by mert.altinoez -

09 | Digital Sustainability: People, Books and Communities 🌱

In this blog post, I want to share all the people, books and communities that inspired me during my research about Digital Sustainability. Without further ado, let’s get started.

People

Thorsten Jonas
is the person that got me into Digital Sustainability one year ago. He is an Sustainable UX Advocate and Keynote Speaker based out of Hamburg, Germany. At the beginning of 2021, he started the global non-profit community „SUX – the Sustainable UX Network“ with an international group of designers, to push Sustainable UX further for and with the digital creative community.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thorstenjonas/

Don Norman
is founding Director of The Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego. He is co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group (now retired), a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and former Vice President of Apple. His latest work expands the notion of being human-centered to consider the impact upon the environment, upon all cultures, and upon quality of life: Humanity centered.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnorman/

Tim Frick
is the founder and president of Mightybytes, Inc., a Chicago-based digital agency that helps social enterprises, sustainable brands, and large nonprofits solve problems and meet business and marketing goals. He has over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur, speaker, educator, and environmentalist, and is passionate about using business as a force for good in the world.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timfrick/

Gerry McGovern
is the founder and CEO of Customer Carewords. He is a highly-regarded speaker, he has spoken on digital customer experience in more than 35 countries and has written eight books about digital design. The Irish Times has described Gerry as one of five visionaries who have had a major impact on the development of the Web.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerry-mcgovern-07876469/

Books

Designing for Sustainability. A guide to building greener digital products & services.
By Tim Frick

„Pixels use electricity, and a lot of it. If the Internet were a country, it would be the sixth largest in terms of electricity use. That’s because today’s average web page has surpassed two megabytes in size, leading to slow load times, frustrated users, and a lot of wasted energy. With this practical guide, your web design team will learn how to apply sustainability principles for creating speedy, user-friendly, and energy-efficient digital products and services. Author Tim Frick introduces a web design framework that focuses on four key areas where these principles can make a difference: content strategy, performance optimization, design and user experience, and green hosting. You’ll discover how to provide users with a streamlined experience, while reducing the environmental impact of your products and services.“

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-for-sustainability/9781491935767/

World Wide Waste. How digital is killing our planet – And what we can do about it.
By Gerry McGovern

“Deep in the throes of the seemingly unstoppable growth of tech, a modern-day Thoreau has emerged in the guise of Gerry McGovern – decrying the massive, hidden negative impacts of tech on the environment. Every age needs contrarians who will speak about the unpopular topics that we choose to accept or simply ignore. Before it is too late – and in fact it might already be – McGovern has thoroughly documented in the World Wide Waste how tech damages the earth – and what we should be doing about it. It goes far beyond those acres of discarded computer hardware conveniently dumped in Third World countries.”

https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/

Design for a Better World. Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered.
By Don Norman

“The world is a mess. Our dire predicament, from collapsing social structures to the climate crisis, has been millennia in the making and can be tracked back to the erroneous belief that the earth’s resources are infinite. The key to change, says Don Norman, is human behavior, covered in the books three major themes: meaning, sustainability, and humanity centeredness. Emphasize quality of life, not monetary rewards; restructure how we live to better protect the environment; and focus on all of humanity. Design for a Better World presents an eye opening diagnosis of where we’ve gone wrong and a clear prescription of making things better.”

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548304/design-for-a-better-world/

The Life-Centred Design Guide. Design strategies and tools supporting a thriving planet for all.
By Damien Lutz

“Life-centric design aligns responsible businesses and designers with global goals to design physical and digital products and services that renourish the planet and foster fair and diverse ways of being. Life centered design still emerging, however, so awareness of it is low, those who practice it are few, how it is practiced varies, and hybridization of physical and digital product design strategies is nascent. The Life-Centered Design Guide introduces a collection of today’s life-centered design approaches and speculates a future snapshot of what the framework might become if the variations merged.”

https://lifecentred.design/the-life-centred-design-guide/

Communities

The Sustainable UX Network
“SUX was founded 2021 by a group of designers led by Thorsten Jonas with the idea to develop a playbook, to drive sustainability in UX and through UX, based on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN and non-profit – for the community and with the community. Meanwhile SUX grew from a project to an ongoing initiative and global community of (UX-)designers from all over the world.”

Website: https://sustainableuxnetwork.com
Notion: https://suxnetwork.notion.site
Slack: https://sustainable-ux.slack.com

Sustainable Web Design Community Group
“This group is creating guidelines, tools, and resources for web and digital professionals to incorporate sustainability and related principles into their workflows and work practices. The goal is to make the process of creating and managing the entire life cycle of digital products and services more sustainable, while the use of digital products should also encourage better practices for users.”

Website: https://sustainablewebdesign.org
W3C Community Group: https://www.w3.org/community/sustyweb/
GitHub: https://github.com/w3c/sustyweb

This is it (for now). I hope you check out some of the people, books and/or communities.
Cheers!

by mert.altinoez -

06 | World Wide Waste: Webwaste 🌱

Unfortunately, I have found that many digital designers and developers ignore ordinary people living on ordinary wages. Not because designers and developers are bad people. No. It’s because most digital professionals live in a high-tech, large-screen, high-resolution, unlimited high-speed bandwidth bubble. Get some fresh air out in the real world. Get out of the bubble.

(McGovern 2020, p. 105)

Today, I want to shortly summarize the chapter Webwaste from Gerry McGoverns book, World Wide Waste1. This chapter mainly deals with the correlation between web design and sustainable user experience on the web. It covers topics like: page size, image and video use, overall content implementation as well as coding.

The Web is obese

It is worth noting that the number of websites on the  internet has increased significantly over the years, from around 3,000 in 1994 to approximately 1.7 billion in 2019. Additionally, webpages have grown in size, from about 100 KB to roughly 4 MB between 2003 and 2019. It is interesting to observe that the average load time for webpages has also increased, from approximately 4.3 seconds on mobile phones in 2013 to about 10.3 seconds on computers and 27.3 seconds on mobile devices by October 2019. It is widely acknowledged that slow websites are not well-received by users. In 2018, a study conducted by Google revealed that more than half of mobile users would leave a webpage if it took longer than three seconds to load.

Third-Party Services

The implemented third-party services (cookies) mostly function like a Trojan Horse. You think you’re accessing one website or app, but then all these other third-parties start accessing you and start tracking your web activities. This does not only raise privacy concerns but also consumes more energy than necessary, because you want to enter one website but it is filled with 22 third-party services, so you ultimately enter or get entered by 23 websites or services. 

Images

The use of certain images on the Web has been identified as a potential source of digital pollution. Some of these images, such as clichéd and stock images, may not add any value, interest or use to the content. They may also contribute to page bloat, which can slow down page loading times and generate unnecessary pollution. Additionally, they may occupy valuable space on the page, which could otherwise be used for more useful content, leading to unnecessary scrolling. It is worth noting that high-resolution images can have a considerable impact on the environment. As an example, moving from 4K to 8K resolution triples the file size. A 4K image, which has a size of 6.9 MB, increases to 18 MB at 8K. Furthermore, text-only solutions tend to perform better. This is exemplified by a UK government initiative to encourage people to sign up as potential organ donors, which tested eight different approaches. Interestingly, those that used images were found to be the least effective.

Videos

Every time you see a video, imagine seeing a little diesel truck belching fumes as it trundles across the web, because that’s the impact videso have on the environment. One second of video has as much impact on the environment as 50.000 words of text, which is enough text for a pretty hefty book. Scientist Rabih Bashroush calculated that the music video for “Despacito” consumed as much electricity as Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Somalia, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic would use in a year. So please, only use video when you know it makes a real difference. 

JavaScript, CSS and HTML

It has been observed that 1 KB of JavaScript causes more pollution than 1 KB of text due to the energy-intensive processes it sets in motion. In fact, processing 370 KB of JavaScript on an average smartphone used in 2019 could take up to 12 seconds, which can be particularly challenging for older, slower phones, causing them to slow down or even freeze.  Minimizing JavaScript size is an important consideration for web pages, as it can often have a significant impact on loading times. CSS and HTML control the layout and presentation of content on a webpage. HTML can easily become bloated and needs to be carefully maintained and minimized. In using CSS, it has become convenient to apply frameworks. These are all-in-one packages that contain all the CSS you might need to use and much, much more. These frameworks might load about 100 KB of CSS but usually most sites don’t need any more than 10 KB of the 100 KB downloaded. So 90 % is waste.

What can you take away today?

Every image, every sentence, every line of code creates pollution because it needs energy. While not creating anything is one way to be environmentally friendly, reusing is often a better option. Sharing something that is lean and useful that you have created can also help to reduce pollution, as it means that someone else will not need to create it. Additionally, deleting something that is no longer needed can help to reduce pollution, as storing and transmitting data also contributes to pollution.

Every day decide on at least one thing you won’t do, one thing you’ll reuse, one thing you’ll share, one thing you’ll remove. It’s not that difficult to create or to add something. To remove what needs to be removed, to see what is unnecessary, what is getting in the way, that is such an unappreciated and deep skill. Not just that, to remove requires bravery.

  1. McGovern, Gerry (2020): World Wide Waste. How digital is killing our planet – and what we can do about it.  ↩︎