The Climate is On and We All Know Where the Switch Is.
From late-night appliance mysteries to daylight design strategies for sustainability
Dear Designer,
I woke up in the middle of the night and the oven light was on.
I didn’t know how to shut it off. I looked everywhere — on the oven’s dashboard, under the lip of the dashboard, above the oven, near the oven.
I even opened the oven and thought, maybe there is switch inside the oven.
We recently moved (10 months ago) into a new apartment and I have still not figured out where all of the switches and dials and doohickeys are.
And here I was, at 3 am, my wife away, and the stupid oven light was on. I opened and closed the oven door and the light, maddeningly and mightily, persisted to stay on. Despite my willing it to go away!
I hit the head and then went back to sleep.
In the morning, I had a better look at the dashboard and here is what I saw:
Can you find the oven light button? Is it obvious or is it hidden? On most keypads, the bottom left-most key is reserved for the star or the asterisk.
Yes, there is the oven light. And, after pressing it, yes, the light went off.
Why this dumb, long-winded story of my own incompetence? In part, this is a tale of an anonymous appliance dashboard designer who figured it would be a good idea to jam the oven light switch in a spot some people would miss. Yes, design, by design, is a delicate act.
But my larger point is that solutions are often right in front of our noses — despite or even because of bad design decisions that others make.
We just need to look a little bit harder, for ourselves — and, preferably in the light of day.
What does this have to do with climate change, dude?
In my previous post I wrote that climate change is not going away, despite our own best wishes and hopes and the ongoing maximization of quotidian complexity accompanied by attention decay, bad state actors and the rise of non-human intelligence.
A recent report shows that we are thirty-six months away from never going back to a planet that was 1.5 degrees Celsius cooler.
What are we supposed to do if we want to address climate change amidst all of this, dear designer?
Well, there are a lot of resources available. I want to call out a few to start your journey around designing for sustainability and then I’d like to do what I do best — editorialize.
First, my good friend, Tim Frick, wrote a book called Designing for Sustainability many years ago. Tim is considered one of the leading voices in calling for the ethical creation of digital products and few folks understand the theoretical and practical implications of addressing climate through design-oriented technology better than him.
Tim’s blog post Is Your Digital Marketing Strategy at Odds with Your Climate Strategy? is an excellent primer on how sustainability can be built into every action you do — from planning websites, to writing and managing content, to designing, developing and hosting your project. The post brings forth this salient quote by Gerry Govern:
When it comes to information and data, we have been sold the lie that it’s all in the Cloud, that it’s ethereal and immaterial. Digital is physical. Storing the current amount of data we have requires about 70 million servers. Each server caused between one and two tons of CO2 to manufacture, before we even consider the massive quantities of energy to run them, and the even more massive quantities of water to cool them.
(I have had so many conversations with clients over the years that are surprised to learn that their website, email and Instagram usage have carbon footprints. They do because even electrons are physical entities.)
Another superb resource, the Sustainable Web Design, was developed by both Tim and my wonderful colleague Tom Greenwood a few years ago. It offers up 94 clearly written web sustainability recommendations, neatly annotated and beautifully presented and which align with high level design topics like UX, development, hosting and strategy. If you are a digital designer, this is an excellent place to dig in and drill down. The site starts by presenting this nugget on its homepage.
The internet currently produces approximately 3.7% of global carbon emissions, which are rising in line with our hunger to consume more data. Increasingly, web technologies are also being used to sow discontent, erode privacy, prompt unethical decisions, and, in some countries, undermine personal freedoms and the well-being of society.
Finally, sustainable design is only one part of a large framework sometimes called ethical design. (And to raise the stakes, I like to think about the totality of collective design issues as design consciousness, which I’ve written about earlier.)
To be a good steward of the environment as a designer means also being conscientious of how digital products are being used by, for, with and against us. A recent book called the The Ethical Design Handbook by Trine Falbe, Martin Michael Frederiksen and Kim Andersen is a superb guide that makes the business case for ethical design, embedding sustainable and ethical design practices into your work, and providing real world examples of how surveillance capitalism and dark patterns exist and how they can be addressed at a corporate or organizational level.
The book discusses sustainable design at a systemic level, examining personal safety, mass manipulation, ethical governance models and respect-driven design. This quote from the book chilled me.
As Cracked Labs, an independent research institute and creative laboratory, states in its report about “Data Against People”: Systems that make decisions about people based on their data produce substantial adverse effects that can massively limit their choices, opportunities, and life-chances.
Okay, now what, ‘Drew?
I started to compile a short list of all of the activities a designer can do to start a path towards climate-conscious design, production and thinking. The list became ridiculously long and it’s hard, at least for me, to disentangle the emotional substrate of everything that needs to quickly be done from the practical, hard and painstaking realities of sustainable design.
This is in line with what Effective Altruists contend with — that we lionize and passionately fund solutions to the most urgent of social issues of our time, when our resources would go many times further if we approached these issues rationally. For instance, $100 spent on a local organic gardening initiative would go much farther feeding food insecure children in Burundi.
So, if you’re new at this, here is how I suggest approaching sustainability and design.
Read through the articles, books, and resources above. These are foundational and the links they offer will help you to set sail on a unique path that follows your heart and adheres to best practices in sustainable digital design. And make sure that that path is unique. Find a way to bring what you love about user experience, design, illustration, coding, writing or advocacy and build out your own personal framework. Then, find the others (see #3 below).
Revisit the natural world in your own time. This is not about forcing yourself into some millennial paradigm of forest bathing or those more insane versions of outdoor adventuring like “coasteering” or volcano boarding. I’m talking about taking a walk, in a park maybe, without your smartphone or your camera. Or with — if it makes you feel better. Being consciously outside, when weather allows, provides your mind and body with instantaneous and multiple means to understand your deep interconnection with the environment — and the power and fragility of your function on the planet.
Talk with another designer. I know this one sounds frightfully easy, but it’s not, especially for some. Designers are mostly nerdy introverts and we tend to stick to ourselves. By reaching out to another designer, and asking them how they are feeling about the 35C/95F degree weather you’re experiencing today, a conversation about climate anxiety, inertia, privilege and possibility can open. Let’s face it — you won’t land on any quick solutions. But you will feel better knowing that you share this planet with designers who struggle with anxiety, inertia, privilege and possibility.
Thanks for listening to this ramble. Stay cool. Until next week.
Yours,
Image of the week
The Global Climate Strike movement that started in 2019, and which I supported in small ways, remains a powerful model for organizing and gave artists and designers a prominent voice. This poster by Sanya Hyland, an illustrator and printmaker based in Boston and Mexico City, presents the scale of what might happen if we join in with Mother Nature and protect our communities and homes. It is both strident and stirring and I love how Hyland builds a set of powerful stories here through hand lettering, a few colours, and off-kilter sizing.
Quote of the week
A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more pervasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism.
~David Wallace-Wells
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Note to self, the very next day. Some people may say that these recommendations don't go far enough. That designers should not be let off the hook. That they play a grotesquely unexamined role in creating consumption and behavioural patterns that are problematic for the planet. That there are very specific things that they can do to help this planet now -- including community organizing. They will argue that designers should not use AI, that they should build fast networks of other designers, that they should quit their jobs at Facebook, that they should design quilts in co-ops and sell them for the recently unhoused, or that designers should burn their laptops. To me, climate change action requires a deep, personal and retrospective / futurist / spiritual commitment -- and designers are uniquely poised to do so, if they open themselves up to possibility. Then change will happen.
Love Sanya’s poster