It was a privilege and a pleasure to speak at UXScotland yesterday on the topic of ‘Beyond Human Centred Design’
It was a wonderful reminder of how great these community events are and how energising and wonderful it feels to be amongst fellow UX folks.
It was also really encouraging to see digital sustainability crop up within other parts of the schedule.
It feels like people are becoming more aware of digital sustainability and want to do something about it but lack the tools and knowledge to do so.
In my talk I tried to raise awareness of the issue and focussed on sharing a set of tools that I’ve been working on to help accelerate positive change.
The climate stripes created by Professor Ed Hawkins are one of the most effective pieces of communication design I’ve ever seen.
Climate stripes show clearly how global average temperatures have risen over time
They work so well because they make an invisible problem visible, helping people to immediately understand climate change in a simple and visually appealing way.
Decarbonising digital services
Digital services have a significant and growing environmental impact, driven primarily by the energy required to store, transfer and render data.
Unfortunately, most of this impact remains invisible to the people who are responsible for them.
I’ve been working on an approach called ‘decarbonising user journeys’ to make this impact easier to understand and manage.
The principle behind it is simple.
Reduce the weight and energy demand of the pages that make up key digital user journeys in order to reduce the overall environmental impact of the service.
Using tools such as the Website Carbon Calculator, you can calculate the energy efficiency of individual pages and identify where the biggest problems are.
I’ve been experimenting with ways to visualise this information using energy efficiency ratings that people are familiar with from everyday things like household appliances to rate web pages.
My early attempts to visualise the carbon footprint of user journeys
It worked reasonably well but I kept thinking about the simplicity and effectiveness of the climate stripes.
It got me thinking, could a series of stripes be used to visualise the energy efficiency of a digital user journey?
Introducing Webstripes
I’ve been working with the awesome Jon Gibbins to automate the capture of website energy efficiency data and used some of this data to create the website equivalent of the climate stripes.
I’ve called it Webstripes.
Webstripes shows the energy efficiency of a series of pages within a digital user journey
Each stripe represents the energy efficiency of an individual web page that makes up a digital user journey.
I liked the impact of my first attempt but it’s not great if you’re colourblind so I created a better version that more clearly communicates the relationship between page weight and energy efficiency and doesn’t rely on colour to convey information.
Webstripes 2.0
Shorter stripes represent lighter, more energy efficient pages.
Longer stripes represent heavier, less energy efficient pages.
Environmental impact data is often too complicated and confusing.
People can’t (and won’t) act upon things they don’t understand.
I’ve seen first hand how powerful simple visuals such as experience maps can be within organisations to drive positive change.
Webstripes can help teams to quickly identify problem areas and help them focus their optimisation efforts to make the reds turn green.
Beyond human centred design
Human centred design helped make digital services useful, usable and desirable.
But if we only optimise for people, without considering the wider impacts of our work we risk designing services that are harming the environment.
Our work must now focus beyond human centred design.
Learning how to do this effectively has to be our priority given the climate emergency and proliferation of digitisation within our every day lives.
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
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!
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.
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.
Climate product leaders playbook – 38 nature-positive best practices to enhance your product management skills and contribute to the fight against climate change and biodiversity crises.
I had a great time chatting to Marc on the Service Design Show podcast recently about all things sustainability, service design and decarbonising user journeys.
