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    Sustainable Web Design
    Sustainable Web Design
    Sustainable Web Design
    Ebook154 pages1 hour

    Sustainable Web Design

    By Tom Greenwood

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    About this ebook

    The internet may be digital, but it carries a very physical cost. From image files to colors to coding languages to servers, the choices we make in our web work can eat up electricity and spit out carbon-and as the internet grows, so does the cost to the environme

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWholegrain Books
    Release dateAug 22, 2024
    ISBN9781068759413
    Sustainable Web Design
    Author

    Tom Greenwood

    Tom Greenwood is the co-founder of the London based digital agency Wholegrain, a Certified B Corp and a specialist in web sustainability. He has been featured on the BBC, CNN and in the documentary film 'Responsible' as an expert on the intersection of digital design, business and sustainability. He also writes 'Oxymoron' on Substack, exploring the confusing world of sustainable business. In his spare time, he has an unhealthy obsession with natural wellness, and enjoys running barefoot around the woods, jumping in the sea and feasting on whole plant foods.

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      Book preview

      Sustainable Web Design - Tom Greenwood

      Cover of Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood

      ISBN: 978-1-0687594-1-3

      Wholegrain Books

      United Kingdom

      Copyright © 2021 Tom Greenwood. Updated 2024.

      All rights reserved

      For future generations

      Foreword

      The only proper way to introduce the subject of this book is by first dismantling the idea that digital experiences are exempt from environmental costs. We create digital litter that has tangible consequences, manifesting as greenhouse gas emissions and factory waste. If the internet is a public space, then we ought to treat it as the most valuable of its kind—an internet that lacks organization and cleanliness should bring us discomfort the way a polluted watering hole or neglected public restroom would. Instead, we have been reckless in the way we move about that public space, jeopardizing its future and that of our physical world.

      However, the growing popularity of both technology and climate action means the emergence of those who operate at their intersection. The very fact that this book was written is living proof that there is an audience for sustainable web design— perhaps a mix of technologists and designers and climate experts who have a metaphorical foot in both worlds. (As an internet-era professional who lives in this overlap myself, I often wonder which I am first: a member of the climate-concerned, or a digital designer.)

      I suspect all of us who find ourselves here feel somewhat lost and even a little bit unsupervised in our forays into this work, though our egos may not allow us to admit it. Even the elementary principles of sustainable web design have yet to be popularized. This book, and its wonderful author Tom Greenwood, will hopefully be part of an exciting exposition to a generation concerned about the environmental impact of our online selves, and confident in how to grapple with it.

      To the technological professional, to the advocates of the environment, and to the users of the web: may this be a companion to your own education on the complicated, beautiful, and tragic union between the internet and our natural environment.

      —Rachel He

      Introduction

      There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today.

      Victor Papanek, who wrote these words in his 1971 book Design for the Real World, was an early pioneer of what we now call sustainable design. Papanek rallied against the use of design as a tool to fuel consumerism, and asserted that designers have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to help create a better world.

      Thirty years later, as an environmentally minded teenager studying product design at university, I was inspired by Papanek’s work. I was passionate about pursuing a career in product design, but only if I could also be a part of the solution to the environmental crisis. I chose sustainable design as my thesis topic and spent my final year researching every tool, technique, book, regulation, and case study of sustainable product design. Keen to inspire other designers to pursue sustainable practices, I put all of this information on a website in the first online guide to sustainable product design (Fig 0.1). At a time when product design almost exclusively referred to the design and engineering of physical products and services, that website was one of my first steps into the digital world.

      At the turn of the millennium, when anyone talked about digital products or services in the context of sustainability, it was mainly as a potential panacea to our trash-producing global consumer culture. When my wife Vineeta and I set up Wholegrain Digital in 2007, it was with the rationale that we wanted to move away from designing and engineering physical products that might end up in landfill. Digital design could never become physical trash, and so we felt safely on the side of good environmental practice with our digital studio.

      Fig 0.1: When I created espdesign.org, product design still meant the design of real things.

      That attitude shifted in 2016, when I learned that the world’s data centers use more electricity than the whole of the United Kingdom (bit.ly/swd-0-1). Holy guacamole! There we were, conscientiously turning off the lights when we left a room to save energy, recycling our waste and offsetting our travel, oblivious to the fact that the seemingly harmless digital products we designed were always on—in our offices, in our homes, and in our pockets. I’m embarrassed to admit it took nearly a decade from starting the business before we thought to even ask how much energy websites actually use. 

      As we’ll see in the chapters ahead, websites demand a great deal of electricity, and all that power has to come from somewhere. No longer can we dismiss these concerns as irrelevant. The time has come for digital professionals to take leadership in our industry and develop a culture where sustainability is fundamental to everything we do. 

      I must clarify that sustainability in this book refers to the sustainability of our natural environment and our urgent need to cut carbon emissions to keep those natural systems in balance. It’s not that financial profit or social value don’t matter. I’ve long subscribed to John Elkington’s principle of the Triple Bottom Line, a concept he introduced in the early ’90s to suggest that we should measure profit not just on a financial bottom line, but also measure the benefit of our business to society and to the natural environment.

      I don’t have to tell you that your business needs to be financially sustainable, and there are plenty of books written about human-centered design, accessible design, inclusive design, and other social aspects of design and tech. However, there’s an eerie silence about digital technology and the environment. Nature is the source from which all else grows. Without it, there is no financial profit, no social value, and no digital industry.

      Whatever your role in the digital sector, this book aims to provide a starting point to help you understand the issues of sustainability, as well as the tools, techniques, and processes that can help us to create sustainable digital products. We’ll also look at how we can approach sustainability in the business side of digital, and how climate change may impact the internet itself. From this foundation, I hope we can all help to create a web fit for the future we all face.

      Chapter 1. What Is Sustainable Web Design?

      The enormous and complex system that makes it possible for you to read an email, visit a web page, search on Google, or watch the latest series of The Crown—acts which may involve your phone, computer, television, Wi-Fi routers, a local telecom network, global and national repeater stations, and data centers—uses electricity at every stage. If the internet were a country, it would be the sixth most polluting country in the world, with annual emissions similar to those of Germany (Fig 1.1) (bit.ly/swd-1-1).

      Fig 1.1: Data for 2018 shows that when viewed as a whole, the internet is equivalent to one of the world’s most polluting countries (publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository).

      The number of people connected to the internet is growing rapidly, with Cisco predicting two-thirds of the world’s population will be connected by 2023 (bit.ly/swd-1-2). At a time when we need to be moving rapidly towards a zero-carbon economy, our hunger for data and web services is growing ever greater—as are our internet emissions. A 2018 paper published in the Journal of Cleaner Production estimated that communication technology will use 14 percent of global electricity by 2040, up from just under 4 percent in 2020 (bit.ly/swd-1-3).

      As web designers we have long been blessed by ever-increasing internet speeds and computing power. Ironically, as computing and networks have become more efficient, we’ve tended to make increasingly power hungry and polluting websites. Like me just a few years ago, most of the web developers making these products simply didn’t realize that digital services have an environmental impact. But past ignorance won’t excuse continued inaction when the stakes are so high. If we wish to create web services that are good for people and the planet, we must take responsibility for the environmental impact of the work we do. This is what sustainable web design as a practice seeks to do.

      Sustainable web design is an approach to designing web services that prioritizes the health of our home planet. At its core is a focus on reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption. What we need in every web project is a sustainability champion: at least one person who understands the issues, has some ideas for potential solutions, and can guide and encourage their fellow team members to consider sustainability at every stage of the project.

      The principles and advice I’ve focused on here will equip you to become that champion in your own web design work. As we’ll see, in creating a web that’s better for the planet, we’ll create a web that’s better for people, too.

      Fundamental Principles for a Sustainable Web

      Sustainability initiatives tend to deliver incremental improvements that are bolted on to traditional ways of doing things. Radical and fundamental changes are what we need at this point to make sustainability part of the very fabric of design. That means we need to think about sustainability more deeply and be prepared to question the way that we have always done things.

      In 2019, I coauthored the Sustainable Web Manifesto with a small group of fellow designers, developers, and digital professionals (Fig 1.2). The project aims to raise awareness of sustainability in

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