Regenerative design principles

Our work has unquestionable reach and impact – but does it always have the positive impact we intended?

We’re learning more and more about the negative impacts of technology such as addiction, manipulation, bias, excessive energy consumption and information overload every day.

So as responsible designers how might we minimise the risks of these harms resulting from our work?

Here’s an idea.

Imagine if we deliberately designed things to have a net positive impact on the world?

I think that design principles can be a useful tool to help us to do just this.

Design principles help us to make our intentions clear, keep us on the right track and to set the right tone without being too prescriptive.

Originally I set out to create some ‘sustainable design principles’ but being sustainable – (i.e. doing no harm) is no longer enough.

Instead, we must strive for our work to be ‘regenerative’ – doing ‘more good than harm’.

So here’s my first draft of some regenerative design principles.

I’ve written them with digital services in mind so you might need to tweak them to suit your own context.

Use them to help you design better services that benefit people, the economy and the environment.

As ever, I’d welcome any comments and suggestions to improve them.

Please use, modify and share as you wish.

Cheers!

1. Integrity first

  • Respect people’s attention, data and privacy
  • Do not manipulate, mislead or exploit people
  • Be transparent about your environmental impact so people can make informed choices about using your service

2. Include everyone

  • Ensure your service can be used by the widest possible range of people
  • Actively identify who is excluded and under-represented and seek to include them

3. Elegant simplicity

  • Make your service as simple, lightweight and as easy to use as possible
  • Aim to do more with less by delivering maximum value from the minimum input of materials, resources and energy

4. Learn and adapt

  • Work to deeply understand and meticulously serve the needs of your users and stakeholders
  • Learn from actual real-world use of your service and continually adapt and improve it to meet ever changing user needs, behaviours and requirements

5. Collaborate and share

  • Share your successes, failures and resources as openly as possible.
  • Actively contribute to shared knowledge, standards and tools helps the whole system to learn from everyone else

6. Be ‘net positive’

  • Aim to leave things in a better state than you found them
  • Create measurable benefits for people, the economy and the environment

7. Think global, act local

  • Understand how your service impacts wider social, economic and environmental systems and minimise any unintended consequences that you may contribute towards
  • Do what you can with what you can control. Every incremental improvement will make a difference

8. Build for the long term

  • Ensure your service is resilient, adaptable and easy to maintain
  • Prioritise repair and reuse over replacement
  • Enable responsible decommissioning of services, ensuring data is portable and service users can easily leave

Benchmark your web sustainability maturity

I’ve made a tool (in Miro) to help you benchmark your web sustainability maturity using the W3C’s Web Sustainability Guidelines.

The idea is to evaluate your progress against each of the guidelines as a team to benchmark where you are today and to see where you need to improve.

This is very much a prototype but feels like it’s got legs. Please help yourself to a copy (just duplicate the board), have a play with it and I’d love any feedback to help improve it!

Introducing NatureNow

After a recent trip to the ‘More than human’ exhibition at the Design museum I felt inspired to make something.

One particular exhibit, ‘Nature Calendar’ by Marcus Coates really captured my imagination.

His calendar simply lists specific events that happen in the natural world throughout the year in the UK.

I love the idea of having a daily reminder of things that are happening in the natural world, to help shift our thoughts from the everyday, to offer perspective and to remind us of the amazing things that are happening around us.

I thought I’d have a crack at making my own digital version.

It’s been fun (and painful) trying to make it work and fun experimenting with various AI tools to try and bring something to life.

The real joy has been researching the different natural events and discovering the concept of phenology (the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena).

My aim is to convey both what is happening and importantly how the timing of things is changing due to our warming climate.

It’s still a prototype (well isn’t everything) but the 1st September felt like a good day to release it into the world, so here’s ‘NatureNow‘

If you ‘save to home screen’ from your mobile browser (via the share option in your browser) it acts as an app so you can easily check out what is going on every day.

Hopefully it’ll help you to daydream while on the bus, take the edge off that nasty deadline and help you tune into what’s going around you.

Enjoy!

Useful sustainability related design resources

For the last year or so I’ve been on a mission to try and reduce the environmental impact of the internet.

Here are some of the resources that I’ve compiled along the way that I’ve found useful and inspiring along with some of my own work that they have all helped shape in some way.

I hope you find them useful.

Books:

Website Carbon Calculators:

Useful articles & presentations:

Web resources:

Useful videos:

Decarbonising the Premier League

Earlier this year, Richard Masters , Chief Executive at the Premier League, launched their Environmental Sustainability strategy.

It focusses on three key priorities :

  1. To become net zero by 2040
  2. To support decarbonisation across the league
  3. To raise awareness of climate change

As a football fan and someone on a mission to reduce the environmental impact of the internet this caught my eye.

Many people don’t realise that the internet is responsible for higher global greenhouse gas emissions than the aviation industry.

With over 60% of the global population now spending 40% of their waking hours online, this trend is set to continue leading to predictions that the internet will be responsible for 40% of global greenhouse emissions by 2040.

Given these alarming figures I wonder if the Premier League are prioritising or even aware of the potential carbon footprint of the club websites in relation to their decarbonisation objectives?

Club websites serve huge global fanbases and are typically content heavy, particularly with images and videos which are energy-intensive to store and transfer to users’ devices.

Multiple this usage across the 20 Premier League club websites and the cumulative impact of millions of page loads results in a significant carbon footprint.

So this all got me thinking…

Who would win the Premier League if the winner was the club the smallest website carbon footprint?

I chatted to the folks at Cardamon about the idea and they kindly offered evaluate the websites using their carbon calculator.

To make the results comparable, we calculated the carbon footprint of 10,000 visits to the homepages of each site (clearly the footprint of the entire websites will be significantly higher).**

And the results are in!

A league table containing all of the premier league football teams ranked by the carbon footprint of their club website. The club with the lowest homepage carbon footprint is Manchester City and the club with the largest homepage carbon footprint is Ipswich Town. The table show the carbon emissions and energy usage from 10,000 visits to each of their homepages and whether they are using green hosting or not. The full ranking (best to worst) is Manchester City, Everton, Arsenal, Chelsea, West Ham, Manchester United, Wolves, Southampton, Crystal Palace, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Fulham, Leicester City, Bournemouth, Brighton, Newcastle United, Spurs, Brentford and Ipswich Town.
The Premier League of website homepage carbon emissions

So hats off to Man City for having the lowest homepage carbon footprint, but let’s face it they’re the best of a bad bunch.

It’s no surprise that Ipswich are anchored to the bottom of the table given their hefty 29 MB homepage.

If the Premier League are serious about meeting their sustainability goals then decarbonising club websites must be a key part of their strategy.

Even a tactical focus on switching them all to green hosting would make a huge difference and feels like a simple tap in.

The benefits of low carbon websites

The benefits of low carbon websites extend far beyond the environment.

Low carbon websites are deliberately designed to be as simple as possible making them easier to use, download faster and available to more people.

Their simplicity means they are more efficient, effective and use less energy – making them better for people, performance, planet and profit.

So what about the carbon footprint of your own website?

How much do you know about the carbon footprint of your websites and what is being done within your organisation to minimise it?

What risk does ignoring your digital carbon footprint pose to your reputation, values or wider sustainability goals?

I’d argue a very significant one.

The climate crisis demands that every responsible organisation should make a plan to minimise the environmental impact of their digital product and services, but many simply don’t know where to start.

I’ve created some simple and practical free tools that will help get the ball rolling:

It would be wonderful to see a very different story in the table next year, seeing the reds, blues and lilywhites becoming greener.

I hope this helps to nudge the clubs in the right direction to minimise the environmental impact of their websites.

If anyone needs advice, help kicking off or hands-on support with any of this I’m here to help – just drop me a line.

cc Will Hutton Ellen Shaddock Pete Bradshaw Hannah Mansour James Beale Tom H. Chris Goodwin Rishi Jain Charlotte Miell Helen Hughes Eloise Thompson AIEMA Marcus Parry Max Wilkes-Barker Alex Evans Jesse Foyle Katie Cross

**Cardamon runs with ad blocking on so the impact of adverts on these websites are not included in the results

Thanks again to Adam Newman and the crew at Cardamon for running the numbers for me – here’s the full data set

Use this free template to build your digital sustainability strategy

It’s wonderful to see the Government Digital Service add ‘Minimise Environmental Impact‘ to their design principles for best practice in relation to digital services.

But what exactly should digital professionals do in order to minimise their environmental impact?

To help people get started, I’ve created a ‘Digital Sustainability Strategy’ template (Google doc) that lists a number of activities that will help you reduce both the environmental and societal impacts of your digital services.

Use the template to plan how you will accomplish each of the recommended activities, who will do what and deadlines for when they need to be completed.

🙏 Huge thanks to Tim Frick for reviewing and improving an earlier version, Alex M H Smith for your inspiring strategy related content, Mark Shayler for your awesome advice on strategic tools in your book ‘You Can’t Make Money From a Dead Planet‘ and Natalie MacLees for your awesome plain English accessibility work and her ethos of ‘building in public’.

Simple steps to decarbonise your user journeys

I was shocked to learn that internet is responsible for higher carbon emissions than the aviation industry.

It’s vital that we minimise the environmental impact of our digital products, but knowing where to start and what to do can feel overwhelming.

To help accelerate change, I’ve scoured the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines and extracted some key priority areas that I’ve turned into a simple action plan to help you decarbonise your user journeys.

It doesn’t cover everything but will to help you get off and running.

This is about progress over perfection after all.

So here’s the plan:

  1. Benchmark your carbon footprint
  2. Switch to a green hosting provider
  3. Offer the best possible user experience
  4. Make everything as simple and lightweight as possible
  5. Focus on doing more good than harm

1. Benchmark your carbon footprint

You need to benchmark your emissions to get a clear idea of how your journey is performing, where the problems are and to help you plan and prioritise your decarbonisation efforts.

How?

  • There are loads of great free tools you can use like The Website Carbon Calculator, Ecograder, Cardamon and Google Lighthouse to benchmark useful data such as your carbon footprint, performance, page weight and carbon rating.
  • I’ve mocked up this simple dashboard to demonstrate how you can visualise this benchmarking data to help you to see how well your user journey is performing and identify where you need to focus your decarbonising efforts.
A table showing the results from various online tools such as Google Lighthouse, Website Carbon Calculator and Ecograder that calculate benchmarking data such as carbon footprint, performance data, page weights etc from a set of web pages that make up a user journey.
Your benchmarking results will help you to understand your impact and prioritise your decarbonising efforts

Useful resources:

2. Switch to a green hosting provider

The level of pollution from your user journeys will depend on the carbon intensity of the energy that is used to power them.

Switching to a hosting provider that is powered by green energy will help to make your corner of the internet fossil-free.

How?

3. Offer the best possible user experience

When things are easy to use we spend less time doing them, using less energy as a result.

By ensuring user journeys are useful we can justify the resources we use to create and operate them and by making them accessible we ensure everyone has access to them.

Your objective should be to make your user journey as useful, usable and accessible as possible.

How?

  • Conduct regular user research on a range of devices to ensure you understand user needs and how and where you need to improve your user journeys.
  • Aim for people to be able to successfully complete their tasks first time around without wasting time and energy through errors, needing support or spending more time than necessary trying to do what they are trying to do.
  • Aim to meet the highest level of accessibility compliance possible to ensure the widest possible audience can access and benefit from your service.
  • Remove anything that is distracting or detracts from people being able to complete their tasks and do everything possible to help them.
  • Use established design patterns that people will be familiar with and already know how to use.
  • Always write in plain English and check the average reading age you are writing for (in the UK it’s between 9-11 years old).

Useful resources:

4. Make everything as simple and lightweight as possible

Lightweight pages download faster and consume less energy to be stored and transferred across networks. They will work better in areas with poor connectivity and for users with older devices helping to maximise the amount of people who can access your service during challenging circumstances.

Fundamentally people won’t tolerate slow page loading times and if forced to wait will simply go elsewhere.

How?

  • Reduce – Be ruthless and remove anything (content, pages, scripts, images, features etc.) that isn’t providing any value by questioning the purpose of every element (use these questions to help you).
  • Replace – Look for alternative ways of communicating the same information using lighter weight alternatives. Be particularly careful with using video and AI given how resource intensive they are.
  • Optimise – Ensure that assets such as images, videos, fonts, downloads, animations are suitably optimised to minimise their file size.
  • Think ‘Mobile first’ – Adopt a ‘mobile first’ mindset to help you ensure that people using the smallest screens with poor network connections can still access, use and benefit from your services.

Useful resources:

5. Focus on doing more good than harm

Sustainable services are those that do no harm. We must do better. We should aim to provide regenerative services that do more good than harm and result in a net positive impact on the economy, society and the environment.

Being open about your digital sustainability progress and honest about your successes, failures and plans builds trust and helps your customers to make informed choices about the impact of using your services.

The image show a graph with impact on the y axis (from low to high) and time on the x axis. It shows how organisations can move from a position where they are unsustainable (doing more harm than good) to being sustainable and then ultimately regenerative, where they are doing more good than harm.
The journey towards regenerative design

How?

  • Ensure your business models, values and organisational strategic intent is focussed on acting the best interests of people and planet.
  • Be respectful of people’s time, energy and the effort required of them to use your services.
  • Ensure people are in full control of their data and are only asked to share the minimum amount of personal information possible.
  • Ensure no unintended consequences occur as a result of your service.
  • Don’t use manipulative or deceptive patterns and seek to minimise the time and mental effort required to use your service.
  • Publish a digital sustainability statement that clearly communicates your impact, the work you’ve done to reduce it and the improvement areas that you will be working on next.
  • Add a Website Carbon Badge to to automatically calculate and display the carbon emissions of each page or your website.

Useful resources:

Remember, the spirit of the approach is progress over perfection, so start small and focus on continuous improvement.

Your digital product will never be perfect, but every change you make will help to minimise your environmental impact.