Leave No Trace
How product designers can break from the status quo and help our planet
By Ryan Hayen
How long are you awake in the morning before you go online? Perhaps it’s while you’re still lying in bed, using a news feed or social media as the needed stimulant to push you out from under the covers. Or maybe you wait to open your device until after a warm shower and cup of coffee. If you use sleep tracking apps, you might say you never signed off in the first place.
And, like millions of others during the pandemic, the internet is probably what enabled you to stay in touch with family, or complete entire years of work and/or school remotely. If this sounds familiar, then you live in a part of the world where an internet connection now counts as an essential utility — one that’s as easy to take for granted as the natural gas heating your shower water or the electricity powering your coffee maker.
But if you think we’re hyperconnected today, just wait. Globally, just over 55% of today’s households have an internet connection. This gap between the internet haves and have-nots is referred to as the digital divide, and access is skewed toward richer nations. The gap is projected to close in the next decade as billions of homes connect to the internet for the first time and by 2030 it’s estimated that the technology industry could account for 20% of the global electricity demand. This presents a troublesome dichotomy. On one hand, it supports livelihoods, educations, and bolsters the global economy; on the other hand, the increased usage of the apps, websites, and services that we build will place an even greater strain on our already-overloaded power grids.
These forecasts underscore a big carbon impact for all those pretty pixels and the devices that power them! If you read our previous article, the realization that Digital = Physical is becoming alarmingly clear and this poses our key challenge: how do we enable people from all communities to benefit from increased use of technology, without worsening the polluting and extractive impacts of tech?
Our Green Design Principles
Microsoft has aggressive climate goals aimed at eliminating our carbon emissions, including emissions from the usage of our products and services. To help both ourselves and the industry begin to navigate the complex landscape of the climate crisis and product development, we recently published our Green Design Principles.
The ideas, questions, and actions contained in the Green Design Principles are intended to shine a light on the distance between where we are as an industry and where we aspire to be. They are by no means complete or perfect, but they represent a first step! Microsoft’s Principles of Sustainable Software Engineering training says it well: sustainability isn’t one optimization or inclusive design action, it’s thousands. We recognize that some of the concepts presented here challenge us to reconsider long-standing business conventions or practices, such as attention demanding notifications or growth for the sake of growth.
Given the urgency of the climate crisis, we share this in-progress work to gain feedback from the design community. Through a two-part post, we’ll take a deeper dive into these emerging principles, and pose questions and actions so that we might steer our industry toward a more sustainable future.
We believe that small changes lead to big changes, everyone has a role to play, and helping promote the discussion about sustainability will empower others to raise their voices. These principles were inspired by and built upon numerous other frameworks, which you can check out at the end of this post.
Think Bigger Before You Start
A challenge that digital product makers often face is that the projects they touch are commonly speeding down the road by the time they’re brought in. This can be frustrating for those who have been taught or believe that business follows design, instead of seeing it as a partnership. In reality, the business objectives have already been determined, and the solution needs to be delivered as quickly as possible. Furthermore, there may be minimal budget allocated for deeper design and research, and we may be the only one who has thought once about the environmental sustainability what we’re building.
As we take on the challenge of sparking a sustainable design revolution, we’ll have to think bigger than just pushing design dogma on others, and instead maximize its impact through strategic partnerships and building the connection between sustainability and business success. We’ll need to be intentional about how we nudge entire organizations and systems beyond just user-centered design, and toward a more expansive mindset that brings societal and planetary justice into our decision making.
In part one of two below, let’s further explore the how first principle of “Think Bigger Before You Start” asks us to challenge the status quo and put care first.
Challenge the status quo
Challenging the status quo means asking the right questions and realizing that the future is indeed changeable. In doing so, we aim to arrive at business practices that are more resilient and restore balance to the systems we are a part of. Here are some possible actions that could help kickstart the process of reprogramming our industry habits.
Balance user needs with finite resources — This action prompts us to dispel the illusion that any digital project is infinitely scalable without costs to the finite resources of the environment, mental and physical health of our customers, and society. To draw attention to the depletion of these resources, it helps to ask the following at the onset of new work:
- Are we encouraging people to conserve or consume?
- What resources are we depleting, and how could we regenerate or offset them?
- How could this project present an opportunity to invite others to take climate action?
- Who is harmed, and who is helped if this project succeeds?
- Are we helping a community regenerate a resource at the cost of depleting that of another community?
These questions merely start the conversation, but could begin to nudge a team away from a ‘growth for growth’s sake’ mentality and feature bloat, and toward a better understanding of users’ core needs — which can result in a competitive edge. Organizations might enjoy financial reward by creating superior tools that complete a focused set of tasks with excellence, rather than building Swiss army knife tools that check many boxes without doing any one thing great.
Build on existing knowledge and work — Prior to building something new, what if we looked at what’s already working out there? Rather than building large pieces of a software solution from scratch, or purchasing parts from a supplier, teams should explore the possibility of building upon open-source projects. Choosing to go this route not only avoids the energy spend of duplicative work, but projects with strong communities can lead to more resilient software and help insure against the risk of a single supplier failing.
When it comes to helping solve for more acute climate problems, how can we uplift and learn from those that are on the front lines? In the United States, at least 50 indigenous tribes have assessed climate risks and developed plans to tackle them. Their ability to set laws independently of federal or state governments has led to innovative programs around detecting disease in the fish populations that are critical for their nutrition and culture, water management, and more.
In tech we often have a bias toward believing that the code we write is better than code written by others, or the tools our industry provides are the most equipped to solve any problem it encounters in the real world. Put another way, we can often be looking for a problem that fits our solution. When it comes to the climate crisis, we should swim upstream against this habit and instead build tools that embrace work already accomplished by others, tools that allow hyper-local communities to take the lead.
Many thanks to the Design Justice Network from which this action is borrowed!
Transition alongside our partners — When it comes to sustainability, every company and every customer is at a different stage and it’s important to consider and/or meet people where they’re at. For those who are very early on in their sustainability efforts, it presents an opportunity to bring people along as we move toward more balanced and resilient solutions. If we make an earnest effort in educating and installing incentive structures that reward use of renewable energy or more sustainable business operations, it’s possible that we can turn the tide in a more comprehensive and collaborative fashion.
Dig deeper into the metrics and impact — If you base a team’s success and rewards on a singular metric like Daily Active Users or Revenue, they will put their efforts into maximizing it. In many cases, this can result in tactics that are wasteful and create harmful effects on large populations. In all projects, it’s important to pause and ask, “what metric(s) are we basing success on right now and why?”. Further, what other measurements for success could we include to better steer our tactics away from harmful outcomes, and how could we measure if we satisfied the true user need?
We should also expand our designs methodologies to consider not just humans, but non-humans. For example, what if we considered the health of rivers, endangered animals, or air quality measurements in how we define our product’s impact?
Put care first
The principle of putting care first might be the easiest one to think about and the hardest one to carry out, especially when business objectives, timelines, or even personalities may work against it. Although it can feel like a constant uphill battle, now more than ever we must exercise our ability to identify the relationships between the things we build and the larger systemic issues that they may uphold.
In the context of the climate crisis, what does it mean to put care first and how can we start to do it?
Justice — There’s plenty of lore in Silicon Valley about products that were built in a garage or dorm room, only to take over the world a few years later. While the ‘sole creator’ legend has made for entertaining movies, tech now operates with such ubiquity and scale that there’s much more at stake when we consider the range of outcomes our creations can have. We need to move from a model of designing for people, to designing with people. This means growing beyond usability testing or even customer interviews, to forming deeper working partnerships with communities that are directly and indirectly impacted by the outcome of the design process and the climate impacts it contributes to. One model to reference is the city of Seattle’s community liaison program, which pays representatives of different neighborhood communities to consult directly with city project leaders. The liaisons communicate the needs and feedback of their members, which then is then incorporated into the planning process for major projects such as the building of a new transit station.
We must continually assess the power dynamics between our teams and local communities, finding ways to learn with and from them about how our products could do harm or create disadvantages. Building more direct pathways for two-way communication will also enable us to identify if our product ideas are reinforcing economic inequity, systemic racism, or disproportionately negatively affecting marginalized groups.
To help get started, check out Microsoft’s resources for Harms Modeling, which provides an assessment matrix with factors such as risk of injury and infringement on human rights. Also, our guide on creating and running Community Juries is helpful in creating a forum where your product team can hear about the perceptions and concerns surrounding the project directly from the external stakeholders that are impacted.
Resilience — Climate driven emergencies or disasters are becoming the norm. They might result from extreme record heat waves, wildfires, flooding and drought, tornadoes during the winter, and so on. The impact of these experiences can be very individualized for populations based on where they live, the local infrastructure, and their preparedness levels.
Our users will inevitably experience our products differently in times of crisis, and therefore we should start envisioning them being used in such situations. In doing so, we must work to understand the wide range of environmental, emotional, and health scenarios that people might be experiencing at any given time.
In action this means asking:
- What crises might our users experience?
- Is our product essential in those situations?
- If so, what are the core capabilities of our products and services that must “work” during times of extreme need?
- How could the foundation of our product flex to support scenarios of limited connectivity, power, isolation, fleeing a threat, and the need for spreading crucial information and getting help? Could this flexibility be baked into the experience without having to push an update?
Stay tuned for a second post exploring tactics around building better by default, and please share any thoughts you might have in the comments below!
This blog post is a continued discussion on the Green Design Principles which were originally created by the following people who came together to advance the mission of designing for sustainable futures: Abigail Cawley, Aditi Khazanchi, Anna Alfut, Caitlin Esworthy Greene, Chelsea Braun, Connie Huang, Danielle McClune, Emily Lynam, Jennifer Bost, Martyn Gooding, Pragya Gupta, Rachel Bergman, Ryan Hayen, Sandra Pallier, Sarah Shing, Shane Tierney, Shelley Bjornstad, Soumitri Vadali, and Sue Nguyen.
Thanks to Projects by IF, a global design company that is redesigning trust in technology, who wrote the original Society Centered-Design manifesto that inspired our thinking.
We’d also like to thank the Design Justice Network for their Design Justice Principles, as well as the folks behind Green Software Engineering, Sustainable Service Design, Sustainable Interaction Design, Sustainable Web Design, Digital Earth Experience Principles, and Knowledge Co-Production in Sustainability Research
