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Designing for Sustainability: A Guide to Building Greener Digital Products and Services

Tim Frick

really liked it 4.00 · Rating details · 14 ratings · 3 reviews

Pixels use electricity, and a lot of it. If the Internet were a country, it would be the sixth largest in terms of electricity use. That's because today's average web page has surpassed two megabytes in size, leading to slow load times, frustrated users, and a lot of wasted energy. With this practical guide, your web design team will learn how to apply sustainability princ ...more

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Paperback, 370 pages

Published September 2nd 2016 by O'Reilly Media

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Nov 02, 2020 Dhuaine rated it really liked it

Shelves: tech

It's a tough book to rate. On one hand, it contains a lot of surprisingly concrete and actionable information - for delivery team - about design, development, and subsequent maintenance of digital products. It's an excellent roadmap to creating a website that doesn't waste resources, be it power/electricity, time and annoyance of the users, or even development time. It touches everything from design to technical implementation, with quite a focus on web page optimization and even SEO and web acc ...more

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Jul 24, 2017 Joakim Ljungren rated it liked it

This is a good contribution. The book gives a thorough walkthrough of how to minimize the environmental footprint of digital products. It cuts right to the chase and address a wide area of sustainable actions that can be done as a business, in a very hands-on manner. There are many things to be learned from these examples. You would however think that what can be done to optimize digital products in favor of sustainability is very dependant on each business case, as Frick also agrees in his conc This is a good contribution. The book gives a thorough walkthrough of how to minimize the environmental footprint of digital products. It cuts right to the chase and address a wide area of sustainable actions that can be done as a business, in a very hands-on manner. There are many things to be learned from these examples. You would however think that what can be done to optimize digital products in favor of sustainability is very dependant on each business case, as Frick also agrees in his concluding case study. But for the most part, the book brings up very specific measures of business administration, data strategy, web design and web development to reduce the use of electricity. Perhaps that is the point, but I found that there is consequently not much discussion about how to justify a sustainable perspective and how to find the context-specific sustainable measures within a business scenario. The responsibility here is put on the shoulders of the business, when it instead perhaps could be on the standardized methods that are being used within the field.

The aim of this book is clearly to target the direct ecological impact of digital products, and how to reduce it. I am on the other hand more curious about how people in the UX and tech community see the potential of creating an even more holistic impact with a digital product, as in considering people’s behavior. Affecting human behavior is something that computer systems all around us do and how should we approach this in terms of sustainability? I was expecting to get more insight about this but the book only briefly covers the matter in chapter 5. Frick talks about the entire lifecycle of a digital product. Encouraging more sustainable usage of digital products is mentioned as a part of the task layer in designing a product. It is advocated that sustainable workflows benefit from user research and diverse collaboration. I would like to know more about how these workflows would work in practice, in the context of designing for sustainable behavior.

I think the book ends up getting quite repetitive, where the main theme is about optimizing technology for environmental sustainability, rather than design. If I would boil down the crucial contents to one sentence it would be something like:

Use clear strategies of usability principles, development practices and agile methods to design light, fast and long-term energy-efficient applications that incorporates renewable energy in all business operations.

Overall, the author does a good job covering the landscape of environmentally friendly design methods, but I think it is pretty obvious that he comes from a technical background. So keep that in mind. ...more

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Jun 23, 2017 Amy rated it really liked it

A really comprehensive look at the environmental impacts of the digital world. I learned a lot from reading it and will think differently about my online behaviors and my work as a result. Some portions went above my head as a non-developer.

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