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:

• You Can’t Make Money From a Dead Planet by Mark Shayler
• Designing for Sustainability by Tim Frick
• Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood
• Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard
• Decarbonise Digital by Eric Zie
• #FutureGen : Lessons from a small country by Jane Davidson
• How To Avoid A Climate Disaster by Bill Gates
• How Bad Are Bananas by Mike Berners-Lee
• The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg
• World Wide Waste by Gerry McGovern
• Penguin Green Ideas Series by various authors
• Small is Beautiful by E.F Schumacher
• The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono
• No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg
• Biomimicry : Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine Benyus
• Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows
• Designing Regenerative Cultures by Daniel Christian Wahl
• Ways Of Being : Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by James Bridle
• The Inventor Of The Future : The Visionary Life Of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala Lee

Website Carbon Calculators:

• Ecograder
• Website Carbon Calculator
• Bioscore
• Beacon
• Cardamon
• Google Lighthouse
• Website Carbon Calculators‘ by Daniel Hartley
• ‘Ecograder and Your Web Sustainability Score‘ by Mightybytes , Certified B Corp

Useful articles & presentations:

• Ecodesign for Digital Services by Anne FAUBRY & Aurélie Baton
• 20 Ways to Make your Website More Energy Efficient‘ by Tom Greenwood
• The Environmental Sustainability of Digital Content Consumption – Nature Communications
• Digital Sustainability: How to Get Started Today by Tim Frick
• Developing a set of principles for the design and delivery of greener services by Ned Gartside
• Towards Regenerative Design by James Chudley
• Decarbonising the Premier League by James Chudley
• Use this free template to build your digital sustainability strategy by James Chudley
• Simple steps to decarbonise your user journeys by James Chudley
• Decarbonising User Journeys annotated slides by James Chudley
• Simple questions to help you minimise by James Chudley
• Decarbonising the Premier League by James Chudley
• How to minimise the environmental impact of your digital services by James Chudley
• Nature Inspired Innovation – Slides from our UXScotland talk by James Chudley & Stu Church

Web resources:

• Design Declares is a growing group of designers, design studios, agencies and institutions here to declare a climate and ecological emergency
• Design for Planet from the Design Council
• The Climate Stripes by Professor Ed Hawkins (MBE), a design classic and brilliant piece of information design
• Skills for Planet Blueprint – the critical green skills that all designers need from the Design Council
• lowwwcarbon – Examples of low-carbon web design and development by Nick Lewis
• 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.
• Climate UX – A Rosenfeld community interest group
• Sign the Sustainable Web Manifesto
• The UK Government Design Principle to ‘Minimise Environmental Impact’
• W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines and the more digestible ‘At a Glance’ summary of the guidelines
• Check if your website runs on Green energy provided by the Green Web Foundation
• Find a verified green hosting provider by using the Green Web Directory
• The Sustainable UX Network’s resource collection
• Sustainablewebdesign.org
• W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• Deceptive Patterns Hall of Shame by Harry Brignull
• Unilever’s Digital Sustainability Statement written by Marketa Benisek
• A template for non human personas from Green The Web

Useful videos:

• Design at the Intersection of Technology and Biology an incredible TED talk by Neri Oxman
• Introduction to Regenerative Triangulation – John V Willshire , Smithery, Jan ’25 (YouTube)
• Understanding Sustainable Web Design by Tim Frick (YouTube)
• Are we being good ancestors? A journey through deep time with Prof Robert Macfarlane – Emmanuel College, Cambridge (YouTube)
• Buckminster Fuller on the Geodesic life – The video that introduced me to the fascinating life and thinking of the American futurist Buckminster Fuller
• Decarbonising User Journeys @ UXGlasgow by James Chudley (YouTube)
• The Trojan Horse Strategy for Sustainable Service Design by James Chudley (Service Design Show Podcast on YouTube)
• Decarbonising User Journeys: How minimising enables us to do more with less by James Chudley (Rosenfeld Media : Climate UX)