Lesson 1Does “Digital” equal “Green” ?
- Notion 1 - What´s the environmental impact of the digital world?
- Notion 2 - Sizing up Internet´s carbon emissions.
- Notion 3 - What is the environmental impact of our working habits? (devices)
- Notion 4 - What is the environmental impact of our working habits? (services)
- Notion 5 - Design is where sustainability happens.
- Notion 6 - Review of the main concepts.
Notion 5
Design is where sustainability happens.
Target skills
So far, we have seen what we can do as users of digital technology and services.
However, what about the obese webpages? We can hardly influence the impact the websites have on the environment.
That´s exactly where web designers and developers play a key role. They have to move into a framework of a Sustainable Web Design.
Sustainable web design is not about promoting everything green on your website, it is about layout, software, platforms, host, as well as a working team and business models.
Sustainable web design is an approach that puts people and planet first.
Have you heard of Jevons´ Paradox (postulated by economist William Stanley Jevons in 1860)? According to this theorem the efficiency gains promote increased rather than decreased, consumption of resources. This kind of technological rebound can be observed in the digital world as well. For the heavier websites we build new more efficient hardware, but the problem of the increasing energy consumption is not solved.
To better understand how a web designer influences the carbon footprint of internet, let´s compare a web designer and a car designer.
A car designer designs cars that are produced and later used on the roads. During this process engineers can improve car efficiency but the designer cannot expect that the engineer somehow will trick the car to go 100 km with only 1 litre of fuel. The final sustainability product is determined by the initial designer´s decisions.
A web designer´s role is similar. The rising impact of the web is nourished rather by the designers and not the network engineers. Web designers and developers decide how heavy and energy hungry their final webpage will be. They do it by choosing the layout, imagery, videos, fonts, colours and interactive behaviour of their pages.
Applying effective design that aims at building lightweight pages and improving user experience will lead us to sustainable websites.
That is what our module is about - teaching people how to implement Sustainable Web Design.