Green Design

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:

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.

Principles

These are the overarching qualities that low-impact internet products should strive for in design.

Lean.

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.

Transparent.

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.

Flexible.

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.

Circular.

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.

Get Started

Here are some links to readings, resources, and more to help you learn more about low-tech and sustainability-focused design.