We all know that we have to turn off the light when we go out of the room to save some energy. We all know that we don't need to print all the emails that we receive to save a bit of paper. We also know that we shouldn't buy you clothes every week.

We've become quite good at sweeting resources when it comes to physical things. But it's not clear to all of us that we basically can do the same with our digital apps, websites and digital services. 


We can reduce a lot the amount of energy that is used to load a website by simply a compressing images. Or by choosing to go from a video to an audio format (1). But you can go as far as using ways to code that use less resources.

So if you are to one who is creating the websites or working on an app, look for these sustainable UX (3) and coding practices. And if you're not, then ask your IT staff or marketing staff to know what they are already doing and what else they could do in that perspective to save digital resources. 


Action question

What are all the digital moments of interactions you have with your customers, users or employees? Where could you easily save some energy by compressing images and PDFs and documents? Where you can do a more strategic investment by improving the code behind these digital services?

Footnotes

(1) This is especially smart when in the video format there is not much to see and it's just people talking.

(2) Obviously this is a much larger topic than the few examples that I've mentioned here. You also need to think about the hosting provider, if it's using green energy or not, etc. A good example of a Swiss company that does some great work around this is Infomaniak, The company uses renewable energy for its servers and also uses the heat generated by the servers to then provide heating for houses.

(3) For more about this look at https://sustainableuxnetwork.com/

(4) Swiss Designer Nicolas Lanthemann has created a website called lowwwimpact that serves as a good starter kit with links to articles and resources to help you go further in this.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.