Green Design is a resource of guidelines and best practices for a low-tech, energy efficient, and environmentally sustainable internet.
This project was born of a need to think about wastefulness in digital products. The internet is accelerating in its environmental damages while appearing low-cost to its users. While this is beginning to be documented in academia, there aren’t many spaces for industry designers to begin actionable change. This is where we come in.
Here’s a brief glimpse what’s going on behind-the-scenes:
FALL 2019: Academic research through NYU’s Solar Powered Media Project and Green Grant Initiative
SPRING 2020 - PRESENT: Industry-level research and collaborations, defining goals for impact and applicability
The hope is that this project will one day become a resource for all things sustainable in tech. In the meantime, this site is still under construction and looking for help! Please head over to ‘Contribute’ if you are interested.
These are the overarching qualities that low-impact internet products should strive for in design.
Green Design must, at its core, aspire to be as efficient as possible from a consumption standpoint. Staying “lean” is an existential counter to the recent “fattening” of web content.
Sustainable practices are not familiar to the average internet user — the burden is on the creators to present the right information in the appropriate contexts to be impactful.
High-tech unequivocally remains in the design spotlight for now, and Green Design wants to be for designers of today, finding ways to balance sustainability with the status quo.
Achieving zero-waste means closing traditionally linear processes into regenerative loops. Adopt practices that allow products to give back to wherever they take from, repeatedly.
Here are some links to readings, resources, and more to help you learn more about low-tech and sustainability-focused design.
High-tech has become an existential part of design, and for good reason: it’s most exciting when creating something new that pushes the boundaries of what can be done with technology. However, this often comes at a large cost — generating massive tech debt, pushing innovation over cleanliness and organization.
The energy footprint of the IT sector is already estimated to consume approximately 7% of global electricity. Services like mobile data and short-range WiFi add to overall cost. Prioritizing low-cost energy sources or migrating services to renewable energy help move us towards a renewably powered internet.
Complex, dynamic processes and services make loading and constantly refreshing a single page a very costly activity. Cutting out these processes or making them optional saves energy.
The size of the average web page and weight is steadily increasing. “Heavier” or “larger” websites increase energy use in the network infrastructure, and shorten the lifetime of computers. Smaller, lighter websites alleviate burdens on both networks and computers.
Pushing information just after getting online reduces the overhead of network call overtime, and also lends itself to a faster user experience. Prioritizing offline operation by taking out bluetooth, location / site tracking, etc. is a much more efficient alternative.
Solutions, principles, and considerations to incorporate in sustainability-focused design. Open a solution tile to learn more.
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A collection of helpful links to relevant tools, research, work, and inspiration related to sustainability and tech.
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