Digital Design for Sustainability — What, Why and How?

Harshit Sinha
Aug 28, 2017 · 5 min read

Sustainability is a very popular term, that gets frequently thrown around corporate conference rooms, university classrooms, pitching events and even your closest Starbucks. Everyone wants in on it; from the largest companies and small startups to policy makers and investors. Commonly, sustainability is associated with ecological contexts, that deal with planetary health, global warming, climate change and resource conservation. Product manufacturers and service providers are trying to reduce carbon footprints, use recycled raw materials and extend product lifespans in a bid to become sustainable. However when it comes to the digital economy of software, websites, apps, media content etc, sustainability is often ignored or regarded as irrelevant to the context.

Even the tech giants who’d have us believe that they participate in sustainable practices, speak mostly of hardware and electronics; how their server farms run on renewable energy, or how their new smartphone uses 30% recycled materials. But do we contemplate the meaning of sustainability in a world of intangibles? A scenario that does not deal with material consumption directly? What then is sustainability? Is there something like a sustainable digital product or service?

We like to define sustainability as a systemic practice of consuming resources that allows us to keep consuming them indefinitely. Confusing? Let’s think about it using a common example. If we keep using oil in an un-sustainable manner, we either run out of crude oil (before mother nature could convert more biomass into petroleum in a million years), or we run out of other resources affected by our consumption (an atmosphere that keeps us alive). In either case, we can’t consume crude oil anymore. A sustainable practice would let the system of resources recuperate from the impact of consumption to an extent that it can “sustain” further consumption.

Two important words here are “system” and “resources”. Are all resources tangible or material? Especially in the digital world, are time, human emotion and cognitive ability not resources we must utilize carefully? How does a system of interdependent resources and consumptions, get affected by the un-sustainable use of one of these elements? We spend more time on a webpage, we consume more electricity; we browse Facebook from our offices, we spend less time doing productive tasks; more resources are consumed to give less back to the system. Even an irritated user, bombarded with superfluous information, stops processing relevant information; the resources used to deliver that information have now been wasted.

The Lens of Sustainable Digital Design

If we speak simply of the tangible and material resources we use everyday, through our digital footprints the ICT industry is already among the largest sources of CO2 emissions. A lot of the processes of delivering digital products and experiences to users have redundancies, wastage and inefficiencies built into them. Some consume tangible resources directly, like bloatware or un-optimized digital content while some lower their sustainability scores through intangible experiential impacts. The design of these digital products, services and experiences thus becomes critically important. Good design has the power to build robust and sustainable ecosystems around digital deliverables. It is also thus a great responsibility. Here are some of the ways we think it can be handled better by organizations both big and small.

Design for Lean Experiences

As providers, we are often tempted to deliver as many bells and whistles on the product/service as possible, to captivate our audience. Much like the restaurant that has a five page menu spanning three different cuisines, we seldom benefit from overloading the user with our offerings or choices. We must aim to trim off the superfluous and enrich the core of our value propositions. It is good to diversify in terms of what we can offer, but a lot of organizations, even those that seem successful today, miss out on delivering crisp memorable experiences, simply because they try to do too much for us. In the quest for building end-to-end integrated experiences, we find ourselves guilty of causing unwanted overlaps. Even for the digital consumer, less is more.

Design for Differentiation

How many Uber(s) or Uber-like services can exist in the world? One for each country? Two for each of them? The simple economic fact is that unless each one of these hundreds of services worldwide, offer something that the others can’t, they’ll cease to exist. They’ll also have wasted money, time and other valuable resources in a battle they were destined to lose. Differentiation cannot simply be economic or logistical; there will always be someone who can undercut the current price point, or have more cars on their fleet. A sustainable differentiation would be a uniquely designed business or service model, which the customer would feel loyal towards because they enjoy using it. Such a model would create a barrier-to-entry that is insurmountable by a replica.

Design for Optimal Consumption

We all remember the foreign language channels on our televisions that we weren’t really interested in, but we never opted out of. We didn’t have to pay for them and we never even watched them. But think of the resources that were put into making sure that we could watch them if we wanted to. The electricity that was used, the money that was spent, the human resource that made it possible; what a waste. Something very similar happens today over the internet, as huge amounts of content, largely free of curation or context, are distributed irrespective of need or demand. Whether you want it or not, content, services and products are continuously shoved in your face and down your throats, even if you’ve never shown any inclination towards them. As designers of products/services and creators of content, it also represents an inefficient and wasteful brute-force method of delivery. Poor market research, and ill-designed experiences are neither sustainable for the user nor for the provider. Cognizance of the target audience, right from advertising to as early as the conceptualization of a product/service, is the single most sustainable practice for all kinds of digital offerings.

All said and done, a lot of these practices will take some getting used to. While the shift towards sustainability is slow and painstaking (much like the real world struggle for environmental protection), it is definitely the way forward. We’re trying to add our drops to the proverbial ocean by making the aforementioned practices ubiquitous in all the things that we do at Lernr. To make sure that we aren’t eventually rejected by the system, we must aim to help the resource pools (both tangible and intangible) recuperate from the impact of the consumption of our products and services. If we want to continue adding value to the lives of our users and stay in business the onus to adopt a digitally sustainable design ideology in ours.


Originally published at lernrproject.com on August 28, 2017.

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Harshit Sinha

Written by

Design Strategist at Moonraft | Deep Experience Designer, Neuroscience Researcher, Entrepreneur

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