One of my passions is learning and exploring how tech and sustainability can work together, without having a detrimental impact on the resources of our planet. I recently had a chat with Colin Cripps about all things sustainability and Business Analysis and invited him to do a blog for us.
A quick intro
A little about Colin he is a freelance Business Analyst using his BA skill set to help socially conscious companies create impactful, sustainable products and services.
So who better than Colin to share some of his thoughts and expertise on all things sustainability and designing tech?
Our habits are changing
More people than ever are changing their habits for the environment. And businesses are encouraging the shift. Coffee chains offer discounts for reusable cups, train services advertise CO2-avoiding journeys. And offsetting or tree-planting is becoming a common add-on at checkout. These changes are integral factors in many company’s sustainability strategies, as well as helpful for us to reduce our personal carbon footprints.
But what about our online lives? What is the sustainability impact of our digital habits?
Estimates put the digital industry as responsible for 4% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. This phenomenal figure clearly indicates we must decarbonise our technology. And that’s not considering the tremendous volume of resources consumed by the industry. For example, a conversation with your favourite Generative AI, ChatGPT, consumes ~500ml of water in data centre cooling. Scaled up, dare we think what that phenomenal figure looks like.
How can socially minded businesses help reduce the digital carbon footprint and make their services sustainable?
Here are 3 things I recommend are considered within product and process designs that make sure sustainability is considered and discussed in the design phase.
Sustainability oriented UX
What is this?
To minimise the emissions of your website, design it with sustainability as a key feature of your UX. There are many ways you can deliver an exceptional experience while avoiding a lot of CO2e. Some basic things to consider are, the length of customer journeys, volume of pages and the resolution of photos and video loaded
Why does this help?
Every extra journey step or user action involves extra processing, resulting in more emissions. Every design decision has associated emissions. For example, did you know some colours are more energy-intensive than others?
These changes are also great contributions to the societal aspect of sustainability. For example, streamlining customer journeys and experience around their goals (not yours!) leads to a happier customer. In turn, this builds customer trust and loyalty, which should also increase conversion.
So think wisely about your design to create a much lower emission, more sustainable service for users.
How can you do it?
A very practical way to do this is to define carbon-based non-functional requirements (NFRs) that your team design and build to and are then held accountable against. This encourages positive feature design such as only loading higher res images on an interaction, like when the cursor rolls over an image. Or defaulting to dark mode because it saves energy.
There is always a balance between sustainability and experience. But some trade-offs are worth it.
Avoid dark data
Dark data is all the information captured and stored but never used or looked at. Thanks to the cloud, there’s no practical storage constraint meaning there’s no natural stop-gap or throttle to data capture and storage, resulting in a lot of unnecessary data on company databases. Thinking more actively about data management can have a big impact on emissions
Why does this help?
Recent fashion has been to store anything and everything. Just in case. When this information isn’t required or ever used. This causes a huge amount of unnecessary emissions and waste of resources at the data centres providing the service. And that’s without considering your cloud provider bill…
How can you do it?
A clean way is to set auto expirations on data that is unimportant to business decisions, un-regularly (or never) accessed.
This is a sustainability best practice in multiple ways as it reduces the carbon load of your infrastructure and is beneficial for society by respecting data privacy through technically enforcing data retention policies. Reducing the risk of data leakage and respecting the right to privacy.
Measure – Track, iterate and improve
What is this?
As the saying goes, what gets measured, gets improved (although looking at my Strava account I’m not so sure..). The same goes for emissions. To strategically reduce emissions companies need to be aware of the impact their current processes and tooling have.
Why does this help?
Measuring your carbon intensity gives you a baseline, allowing you to work towards meaningful decarbonisation goals, stay accountable and increase transparency by making informed decisions.
How can you do it?
First, measure and understand your baseline, next allocate those emissions to their causes. If a particular process is a high emitter, what can you do to lower it?
I also encourage clients to a/b test processes, both new and old, and then all things being equal, pick the lower emitter. It’s often surprising how many emissions companies can avoid without impacting experience or results when you make data-driven decisions. Consider the below scenario.
Services with appointment slots normally assume customers need several reminders. Each one has a CO2e cost. You could A/B test this with different volumes of notifications, monitoring for impact on appointment no-shows, reducing notifications to the sweet spot and therefore potentially avoiding emissions.
The point is, with the data you can make an informed decision based on both business and environmental impact.
Hopefully, these few suggestions have given you some inspiration on how to design your services more sustainably and will help you reach your decarbonisation goals.
More about our guest blogger
Colin Cripps
You can get in touch with him on LinkedIn where he’d love to talk about ethical technology and sustainable design practices.
