Re: sustainable swag

Deborah Taylor-Pearce wrote:
> But for subjects such as improved website 
> accessibility or "greening"
> our offices and industrial processes, 
> where the end goal is -- or, at
> least at some point, was -- 
> to have as many of us voluntarily adopt
> the standard as possible, 
> this approach is counter-productive.

To add to the points made by Mark and Rob, I am going to have a major attack
of standards geekery. Sorry.

The problem here is that there are (at least) three different types of
things that all get called 'standards'; I'll call them 'specification',
'assessed', and 'process'.

Rob mentioned ISO Symbol standards. These are examples of specification
standards, and that's where standards started. If you are a manufacturer and
you wanted to purchase (say) nails, at one time they would be handmade and
would come out only in approximate sizes. Improvement in manufacturing
processes meant that it became possible to churn out nails at uniform sizes.
Having a specification for a standard size meant that you could buy your
nails from any manufacturer and say that you wanted a particular one.
Consortia of manufacturers and purchasers got together and agreed that the
'standard' sizes would be x, y and z. This then progressed to other things
were there is some general convenience for agreement over the specification
of something. Sometimes something becomes 'a standard' because one
manufacturer dominates the market to the extent that it shall be so; other
times it's still done through the standards bodies such as ANSI, IEEE
standards, BSI and so on.

Mark mentioned the Fair Trade standard and the Forest Stewardship Council
scheme. These are examples of assessed standards that aim to show that an
organisation has achieved a specific level of whatever it is; in these
particular cases, fair dealing with its suppliers and appropriate
agricultural practices respectively. These are a sort of extension of the
specification standard, in that someone says 'if you do this you can claim
you've met the specification' and then the better ones add some sort of
independent assessment or policing to the mixture. For example, if you want
to claim that you are conformant to the Soil Association's organic food
standard, you have to farm in ways that conform to the Soil Association's
interpretation of organic principles, and you have to pay the Soil
Association to come and check what you do. 

ISO 14001 and ISO 9001 are both examples of process standards. They don't
say what the outcome will be; they don't say who will assess that outcome.
Instead, they say that you must have a documented process that first of all
sets out what you claim you will achieve, then checks that you have in fact
achieved that. I'm not as familiar with ISO 14001, so I'll carry on my
example with the quality standard ISO 9001. You don't have to deliver
something 'of good quality' to conform to ISO 9001. What you have to do is
to agree what the quality requirement is for a particular project (and in
theory, that could state 'this project will be rubbish'). Then you have to
follow the process that you state you will follow (in theory, this could be
'we will do random things'). Then you have to prove that you've followed the
process ('we checked, and indeed what we did was sufficiently random and we
have the statistics to prove that it was random'). Result: you have met the
quality requirement for the project and conformed to the ISO 9001 standard
because you've done exactly what you agreed you would do and can prove that
you have done so. 

In short, process standards can only help organisations to achieve good
outcomes if they are implemented in the appropriate spirit. But my rather
complicated paragraph on ISO 9001 perhaps explains how astonishingly bad
computer systems can get churned out by ISO 9001-conformant computer systems
delivery businesses. It's not so much that the requirements state that the
project will be rubbish, as that it is notoriously hard to write good
requirements for large, complex systems; and then even harder to find out
whether those requirements bear any resemblance to what is actually needed
by the business. But the whole ISO 9001 edifice rests on 'good'
requirements. (One of the issues is that requirements documents are
notoriously lengthy and impenetrable. One of my favourite Dilbert cartoons
is this one, http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1999-08-09/ )

OK, that's enough standards geekery for one day (More than enough?)

Best
Caroline Jarrett
Twitter @cjforms


___________________________________________________________________

Use the following address to post a message to all subscribers: 
 [email protected]

To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your options, visit:
 http://list.InformationDesign.org/mailman/listinfo/infodesign-cafe

For all Information Design matters:
 http://InformationDesign.org

Problems? Write to:
 [email protected]
___________________________________________________________________