The easiest way to dive into a topic such as digital sustainability would be starting with a big headline with direct finger pointing. Such as "the evil video streaming produces", "why the internet is one of the dirties places on earth" and "20 ways to fight the dirt by design" and so many more headlines, my SEO validator would have loved. But seriously, this is a serious topic. And it’s an unbelievable complicated topic, if you dive deeper.
As fostering a more sustainable way of working is also about reducing screen time, I start this article with a takeaway linking to some chapters on my point on digital sustainability.
Takeaway
Start optimizing your own surrounding:
- Measure your energy consumption
- Think of using energy efficient laptop
- Create a more energy efficient website
- Use a hosting provider using green energy
- Use a fair phone contract
- Don’t buy every gadget and use circular markets to sell things you want to exchange
- Above all, define your own private metrics
Reflect the way you create digital products
- Define your business metrics/ethics
- Focus on the overall goal of the project
- Don’t force creative or implementation ideas if they are not needed. There’s maybe a downside.
- Think about the overall process of the project!
Diving into digital sustainability
First of all, I feel guilty. Not too guilty about my own footprints and actions, but the guilt of not writing that article earlier. But it’s been a pain in the ass. It’s so complicated and there’s no one-way street to follow to get to the target of zero emission. The market is so fragmented and you as an individual must make your choices yourself. I guess the best way to do so, is defining your values to tackle the problem.
Do not try to become a person of success but try to become a person of value.
Albert Einstein
My focus for this article is circling around the topic of sustainability for digital projects (one of many on the road for our 21st century challenges). I also want to share more critical thoughts many great articles didn’t reflect too much, such as the way “how many projects” are done. And finally, I also share my personal experiments.
Your impact – in between B Corps, leaders for climate action and your own impact
Honestly, I didn’t finish my whole reading list on my own impact yet. There is an overwhelming collection and it’s not easy to start on a global level.
So, for my personal business, I started the registration to become a B Corp. and didn’t finish yet, because as a one man show I am quite small and don’t even know if I am relevant or even allowed to get a B Corp. Currently I feel more afraid of paying a lot of money without being allowed for the application (there's a fee on submitting long forms). I also looked at leaders for climate action, (funnily B Corp and LFCA use almost the same color value for their yellow), but was declined by them and some others, such as Climate Designers (where I am also registered).
The first two mentioned communities I would call the global level to start, to connect. In terms of target audience, they obviously have different scales, B Corp for corps, LFCA is mostly for companies and climate designers starts on a personal level. As approaching the topic about digital sustainability from that angle didn't lead to a blueprint or clear guideline, there's a clear recommendation from my side: start with yourself.
Measure your impact: Computer
If I speak about your impact, the personal level is the one everyone should start. It's your direct way to improve on digital sustainability. Therefore, I share some little shots about my own electric impact on a working day, kind of my own little experiment:
What you can see are screenshots of my energy consumption on certain days. Something everyone could easily measure with the help of a little smart plug. I used this one here. A smart plug with energy control. I tested all my bigger energy consumers during the day to optimize my usage. The compared data is a typical working day with following setup: A computer, an additional LED Screen, Keyboard and Mouse. Pretty sure from time to time also an external drive got connected.
For testing purposes, I compared a Macbook Air (with M1) and my own PC build, that is used as a hackintosh as well. Mostly in hackintosh mode. The result was pretty straightforward and obvious. If you want to save energy, work on a laptop.
I reduced my daily consumption by almost 70%. This comparison in efficiency is also connected to the fact that we are speaking about an older computer generation. My desktop is around 6 years old, compared to a pretty new, highly efficient Laptop. Buying something new, instead of using the old one you already own is also a tricky decision.
Of course it would be best to bring your old device back to the circular economy or keep using it. In my case I keep the PC for random PC tasks and exchanged my old macbook from 2013 with the new one. I wasn’t able to do certain jobs anymore as a new operating system was needed. Quite annoying policy by the way. But you can't program iOS Apps anymore.
Another source with some tipps on measuring could be found in this article:
Measure your impact: Hosting and your website
Another evaluation based item, that can’t be measured directly is your website. You have to rely on calculators and lists to see if the things you produced fit to an overall digital sustainability strategy. And the results of all those calculators you might know from your personal footprint, such as the lifestyle-impact calculator from doconomy or some other you can google, are indifferent and hard to compare.
They can’t take into consideration each aspect of your life, whether you are never throwing away food or some other things of your “real” living situation in the proper context. Especially when it comes to housing. The calculators only value people living in the latest energy efficient houses and putting fingers at people who live in houses that are not allowed to get renovated that easily. As I mentioned, the problem is calculation.
Same applies for the impact of websites. Every Website has a different target and purpose. Let’s start with a simple calculator website carbon – in this case I am also a fanboy of the work of the agency behind the tool I am mentioning, so please value my assumptions accordingly. Here’s my result:
Basically, this test checks your site based on the data usage. With this easy and straightforward evaluation my website's footprint looks quite good.
If you aim to test a marketing landing page, your results wouldn’t be too good… let’s look at Apples current iPhone generation page, the iPhone 13 pro, you will end up with something completely different:
As you might have noticed from my other writings, I avoid finger pointing. The reason why apple’s site is more dirty is, cause it is staging a product in a wonderful, visual, explorative way with the aim to make you wanna buy the product. To compare their result, i would need to find another, similar explorative site. In terms of this article, they seem dirty.
To all haters who were happy about the negative result of apple, I also looked at a fair product alternative, the fairphone. Though the product is aimed for another target group and the site is by far less explorative, it also has a very bad result. In this case much more problematic in my point of view. They deserve better consulting as this website wasn't properly designed and implemented.
Considerations about the tools for testing a website's footprint
From a designers point of view I didn’t work too much on my own website; It was a good day to get the overall design and far more days to implement it in a more energy efficient matter. I started this website in general as an experiment, see my article "hello world" and my source of inspiration there. I write the articles, without being the best writer. I publish them and modify them to get better over time.
To dive deeper into the optimization of the site I would need much more articles and I don't want to address developers alone. Let's look at some pain points in terms of efficiency i could show you directly on my site: on the homepage you see a visual in the background of “the turning point for your story”, and as the writing says, the background is something individual (in my point of view), so I used p5JS to generate an individual background for each visitor. Is the element needed?
Someone who is only into optimizing for data usage would have said, no, we don't need that element… for me it is a simple supporting element of the message I try to get across and so aprox. 60% !!! of my complete data usage of the homepage connects with this single element in terms of script weight. Unfortunately there’s no better version of p5js.min out there so get my data usage down.
The other big element in terms of data usage on my page are variable fonts (I use two: Inter and Frances)… they are also not needed in terms of efficiency, but for my own wellbeing. The most efficient way would be the usage of system-fonts. So font-families, such as "font-family: -apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,Segoe UI,Roboto,Helvetica Neue,Arial,Noto Sans,sans-serif;" could have been an alternative for the Inter font so save data. For someone, who is not familiar, system-fonts are fonts you have on your computer.
Diving deeper into variable fonts you end up finding ways of optimizing them. For example by font-subsetting. By the way, I did that for the Inter Font and got down the data weight by around 60%. Don't ask about the additional screen time that is connected to this tweak alone. Instead of trying font-subsetting of variable fonts yourself (except you are deep into python and don't own a m1 mac) download my subsetted version here.
All those mentioned data values also connect to the google web-vitals. The result the test delivers could be used to optimize your page. But the question would also be, how long does it take to shrink your digital footprint on this level.
Unfortunately I feel too many people see a chance of business with evaluators around sustainability. For the purpose of web-sustainability i would pledge for a test from the w3c. In terms of app development, there could be submission guidelines that focus more on efficient coding. Leaving this evaluation to the market feels wrong.
One of the things I had a deeper look from other test results was the topic about dark mode and energy consumption. My summary, I would call it a trap. For certain types of screen it is true that dark mode consumes less energy, but the recommendation fell short on basic usability issues with dark ground. Simple example: If text is harder to read, people read slower and need more screen time… so… are we doing a favor if reading gets harder and increase the screen time as well? No.
Now let's get to the best numbers from any test I found: the digitalbeacon test. The comparison of the data to the real world, to get a feeling of what we are really talking about:
These numbers are the true facts everyone needs to know to make use of the data. If I exit my always on, streaming live and don’t stream Netflix for 2 hours, I get my whole monthly energy consumption for the website “refinanced”.
Note: I did not check the facts about the mentioned numbers on the screen.
So why are we discussing? Cause it is important to know what makes an impact. We need more awareness on more levels of our acting. If I would get one million visitors a month, it would be 21 trees a year that would be needed to compensate my website. That's quite a lot.
Green hosting
For hosting, I won’t write that much. Check your site with this tool. And be critical if your hosting provider is shown as bad choice. Ask them yourself and give them the tipp to get listed. I am quite convinced that many hosting provider are missing. I recently received a mail from a clients hosting provider not being listed. They communicated about how many trees they planted last year and the renewable energy they are using for powering their hosting.
Conclusion
If you are interested in more tools for the implementation stage of your website, I recommend the sources on greentheweb.com, a great collected source.
As I said, it's so tricky to get into digital sustainability on a product level. There are many ways to get started. The best way is yourself. For your own digital sites, use the evaluators and strive for fast results to improve and get help of experts, if you want to dive deep.
On a personal level also look at all your other communication items. E-Mails for example mustn't be branded and are way more data-efficient if delivered in plain text. Also sign-out from as much mailings as possible.
Let's look at some other aspects, from a project-management or consulting perspective, how we really work on projects.
The efficient way of working or Pareto principle
Just image our target of creating new things is based on 80% done, based on the pareto principle of someone finishing 80% of the whole job within 20% of the whole estimated time, while finishing the last 20% needs the rest of the time (80%).
I would absolutely agree, that 80% could be done in a short amount of time. Let's take the example of my site: the fine tuning of the site is by far the part that needs most work to limit my footprint. Also on a professional level, whether it was creating campaigns, videos or other communicational items. It's easy to reach satisfying (ok) 80% and painful to reach 95% or even 100%. Not sure if I ever reached the real 100%.
It also depends on the career-direction or level you have. Being a creative director (on a AAA client or project) I always had to strive for the best. As being a creative director (or in this case business director as well), also includes financial aspects, it wasn't easy to balance the financial side if you wanted a 100% project. Honestly I don't think you ever get 95% or more without going over budget (or I never had those clients).
From a project-management perspective you would be happy with 80% if the clients goals were fulfilled, as your budget would say hurray. But before stepping into longer discussions, I get back to the example of my own website here.
For building purposes I used a quick page builder. In my case Elementor. Like other builders such as Oxy or webflow you could start building the site in a visual, intuitive way and don't loose much time on the code part. In this case I would always clearly argument that a visual builder is superior to any non-visual builder in terms of building times, except you write the code as your own language or you need an explorative website that is build on non-standard patterns.
If you want standards, builders are your friends and you achieve the 80% in a very short time. But to achieve the 100% builders will be a pain. To optimize the large data-footprint builders are generating, one needs experience in optimizing them as all builders deserve criticism for their data usage.
Let's look at a typical digital project setup, such as a website on a large scale.
Creating overhead by system
And there we are… how do we work?! Do we need 20 days of design to create something that looks like 80% of the web? Or is it the best way to structure every tiny little site into a complete design system?
Too often I experience consultancy that strives for doing it this or that way just for the purpose of testing something new. Let's take the topic of a design system. Is a design system always needed? No. It depends.
If you have an evolving project over time, a design system could get relevant at a certain stage. The more your product is a SAS solution, a community or large scale shop, the earlier you need it. Same applies if you have many sub-systems within the overall system, e.g. governments, large scale companies with a lot of sub- and business sites.
Needed for every site though? No, why? Asking more why would help here, too.
And this is where many sustainable perspectives fell short.
Meaningful consultation instead of selling the vendor's tray
First, I wanted to write the headline "sustainable consulting", as for me, sustainable consulting is meaningful and within the interest of the tasks and targets of the client. Of course, sometimes clients themselves have the expectation to get a full-blown package with some days of design workshops, 20 wannabe designs (without real contents) for desktop and mobile and a fully documented design system, including a headless system with great static site rendering, a great event tracking concept and the capability to use a youtube independent video streaming and…. you name it.
The true question is, is it creating real value for the client?
If the client is getting wannabe designs without or only partially “real” content, it is likely the client must manage the content by himself/herself. Not the best scenario for a great product. Of course, there’s a traditional issue on what comes first, content or design, but the true answer always has been, they go hand in hand. Not design upfront, content afterwards (This is not working, as the designers could design better, if they know the content and the content part will surely miss parts within the design).
Also, Content upfront and design afterwards lacks in content that is using the opportunities of a contemporary design or even worse, the content doesn’t suit the medium.
Unfortunately, many designers and developers lose their more constructive way of iterative workflows when it comes to developing new digital products. Many tend to build a blown site first, instead of a smart working version that could be improved over time. There mustn't be a fancy word for it, such as a MVP, a prototype or Alpha-release.... those are just words.
A working solution would downsize the working time and the footprint. It would also resolve typical issues clients are facing with the blown system: Budgets are running flat but the need urgent support in managing the contents of the site. Isn't a website supposed to be the container for content?
The iterative approach would help to improve the usability for our system-users, too. A perspective most design workshops are not asking for. With incremental development throughout more stages, design gets developed together, gets filled and tested with real content. The templates could be aligned with the real world challenges the system-users are facing and all who are working together would need less energy.
I assume till here, most developers would have liked what i wrote, but now... I am not sure if these aspects are working in the "agile" sprints many development teams are using as their organizational canvas. If you have a running service, I would say yes. But when creating something new for an initial launch we mostly have waterfall projects that get hidden behind agile methods. The flexibility on an early project stage between content, design, technology needs more versatility. Mixed team sprints for evaluating ideas are such an instrument.
So what about digital sustainability?
If the company is closely related to sustainability, if sustainability is part of the brand’s core identity, I would always recommend an offensive way to promote aspects of sustainability beforehand and explain which consequences there are on design and other production aspects. As I have shown, the topic is complex, how could we expect from clients to know about all aspects that could be relevant? We can't. They need consultation on digital sustainability.
On the other hand, it is tricky to consult clients who deeply need a more explorative site that might make use of more energy heavy technologies to create a deeper level of immersion. The purpose is different, and I can’t seriously tell them to make an energy efficient site, if their target is another one. Emotional aspects need consideration, and it is more important to reduce energy usage on other levels.
The way we structure projects is the best starting point for any kind of project we are facing. Though I am paid by the time I am working on a project, I could absolutely assure that I don't like unneeded iterations and would prefer an emerging product over time. The aspect of assumptions over time gets reduced.
Learn from nature
I truly believe the way we work on many projects is wrong and it essentially starts with the process towards the project itself to reduce the footprint. Better start with the ugly truth in the workshops directly and break down the scope of the overall project in junks. Also strive for a continuous project that is evolving. Same as nature: evolution is a process over time. Nature is evolution. We are not the gods of the projects to put finished pieces at each day.
Digital projects and brands could evolve.
As I didn’t speak about brands so far, I use brands as an example: Babies scream, babies must learn from their surrounding and find their spot in the world (same applies for new companies, one should know they are there but essentially they also have to find their spot). Evolution continues and different levels of confidence emerge. Different influences shape the personality and growth. Baby turn to grown ups and have their screaming youth and their elderly clarity....
So do brands, they are growing, restructuring themself, re-identifying, growing up, finding their way in the world. Finally they might get very confident and market leaders, the elders, the specialists in certain disciplines. Brands also evolve and start unfinished.
So on the one side, you have a brand in some evolutionary stage with different challenges, on the other side you have a project. The project will be an evolution of the previous state in in best case it is growing again. Being part of an evolution increases responsibility. There's no one time hand-off. We need a deeper commitment and can't hide behind some brief.
We must not treat everything as a finished piece in digital.
Pre-assembled products from real live are already taking the step back. They get repairable again. Though it is much easier to create something digital on an incremental basis than it is for real life products, we don't make use of it everywhere we can. Agile isn't agile if it's only a word or method, such as scrum. Mostly those environments became protected elements to not get disturbed. As I said, this is good for some stages of a product, but not for all.
It's consultancy that is needed urgently now to ask the right questions right from the start. We shouldn't fall back into the waterfall world and start listening and questioning the wanted targets and tasks. The iterative approach is the best creation HCD or agile workflows offer. But we must live those processes not just have them as frameworks for hiding ourselves.
Finally it's time to give back and help build a better future. More thoughts on our processes and digital sustainability help to get there.
Other articles and sources:
- Charta für nachhaltiges Design (German only) or Sustainable Web Manifesto
- New perspectives on internet electricity use in 2030
- Branch Magazine
- http archive for all reports around the web
- BIMA – green pages (great collection of links)
- Sustainable web design
- Greendesign.io
- The ethical move
- Principles of green software engineering
- The circular design guide
- If you on a personal level want to start, please watch One percent for the plant.