This article is written by Astrid Loraas / Senior designer, Inmeta, November 2022
You should not believe everything that appears on the Facebook feed, or other feeds
Everyone I know in the digital industry works with sustainability at all levels, or we at least talk about sustainability at all levels — and that’s good!
Paradoxically, it is often on Facebook and on online newspapers that you get an insight into certain comparisons and figures. This little notice ended up on my Facebook wall on July 2021
“On Tuesday, 4.66 billion active internet users sent 306.4 billion emails, 500 million Tweets and we conducted 5.66 billion Google searches. Divided by the number of people globally, each one of us produced 1.7 MB of data per second, and 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years (figures from 2020) and it is expected to double every two years…”
Whether the numbers are correct or not, I felt sick by knowing that as a designer, whom has contributed massively to the development of the internet, has not up until recently understood the environmental impact of my actions.
In recent years, we have designed strategies (meet digitally in teams), we quote the UN’s sustainability goals in new terms (published in pdf reports that are widely distributed by e-mail!), we create sustainability teams with dedicated employees whose task is to shaping colleagues’ attitude to digital sustainability — and that’s a good thing!
It didn’t start with digital sustainability, here’s a little look back
Do you remember the reactions that went viral when the citizens of Oslo started sorted rubbish — around the year 2006?
There was a particularly funny instance regarding the sorting og tea bags and how cumbersome it was. The tea itself was discarded into organic waste, but prior to this you would have to fiddle with removing a small pin that held the thread and bag in place. Once removed the metal pin is discarded into the metal waste, afterwards the paper would go into the paper waste and finally the thread would be discarded into the residual waste. All in all, what an incredibly tedious process.
Of course, being the well-behaved and conscious citizens, we started sorting our trash. The infrastructure was arranged, and it didn’t take long before we became quite good at sorting. Even the kitchen manufacturers started designing modules for this purpose. And of as most recently; Oslo municipality considered imposing fines for those whom sort incorrectly!
After many long years of digitalization, the industry has for some years now begun to think about the digital littering. This also had a start. We thought that the environment was about not using paper, but more environmentally friendly to send emails instead of faxes, letters and cards, create websites instead of brochures, magazines and printed campaigns.
We learn “as we go” and it would turn out that if we publish services and information on digital surfaces, it certainly does not mean that it is more environmentally friendly.
The figures and facts came to light (of course published in digital channels!) on how much energy that the servers that processing and storing our digital publications actually consume/require. Surely more people than me were shocked when we read headlines such as:
“Bitcoin now uses more electricity than the whole of Norway! ”https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index
One point is to familiarize yourself with the UN’s sustainability goals, another is what we can do in our everyday working life in the digitization projects we are working on. After all, we won’t stop creating user-friendly digital services, but we can must strive to find the actions needed to reduce our digital C02 carbon footprint.
We just need need the right attitudes and good methods to achieve this. We can make this. We have done it before with the introduction of WCAG (w3). We learned that accessibility is democracy. We learned to open the empathy through user-centered design, with well-documented guidelines and regulations which we implemented as a natural part of the design process.
As digital service providers, we offer good advice when it comes to accessibility, although we still have a way to go. And now the time has come to give good advice on digital sustainability.
What does this mean for our teams, customers and projects?
We know that new approaches will change companies’ attitudes, perhaps even the products themselves, and not to mention the way we work. This may sound frightening and expensive, but when we have taken the effort to write a sustainability strategy, started the job of changing attitudes within ourselves and in the companies, it is long overdue that we shed light on the topic at an early stage for our customers.
As a development team, we should be promoters towards our clients that sustainability becomes part of their strategy and attitudes, as well as help them to manage their solutions in a sustainable way.
Even when we write offers, we should show and tell why we take digital sustainability seriously. We should deepen our focus and our methodical approach in the development of forward-looking and sustainable digital solutions.
We do this for the product&service to function in the best possible way within the business-critical, resources and needs. The main point is that the solution should help us not to use unnecessary resources to understand or find what we are looking for. Within the industry, this is obvious, but it is not always obvious for those for whom we create solutions — and there we, as suppliers, must dare to see our own visiting time; to give correct and good advice during the process.
Here are some good advice on the way
- As designers, we should think about sustainability early in the concept phase when we design visual profiles:
- Remember that light colours consume more energy than darker colours
- Choose solid and reader-friendly fonts with few styles
- Think smart when choosing graphic elements - Work systematically with design systems and develop tidy code
- Make sure that the content is relevant
- Easy to find
- Prevent double publishing
- Avoid unnecessary downloads
- Build intuitive navigation paths
- Optimal search functions
- Tidy content structure - Avoid heavy map solutions on the page (if this is not the core content of the product), a link to an external map solution is more than enough and of course prevent unnecessary downloads
- Clean up your email and file
- Choose your notifications carefull
- Don’t send attachments that can be stored and read from a central location
How do we know that our actions are helping?
We can measure the carbon footprint of the web solutions we develop, even if the targets don´t say anything about what kind of actions are needed to reduce the digital carbon footprint, or whether your website uses renewable/non-renewable energy.
It’s just a matter of testing and adjusting. You will be surprised by little it takes in terms of designing and coding, to achieve a web based solution that has å smaller carbon footprint than most. In fact, in most cases the changes that are necessary to achive less CO2 emissions don´t necessarily effect how the user experience the solution.
It may seem like a drop in the ocean if we are to contribute to halving CO2 emissions before 2030, but many hands make light work.
It may be that the strongest driver to change will ultimately be the very same thing that was done when WCAG was phased in; Drawing up guidelines and minimum requirements, imposing infringement fee´s or fines for the digital products and services that don´t meet the C02 requirements.
Raise your hand, this job is “Up For Grabs”!
(Thanks to colleagues for input to this post).
