Tags: sustainability

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Wednesday, May 31st, 2023

Future-first design thinking

If we’re serious about creating a sustainable future, perhaps we should change this common phrase from “Form follows Function” to “Form – Function – Future”. While form and function are essential considerations, the future, represented by sustainability, should be at the forefront of our design thinking. And actually, if sustainability is truly at the forefront of the way we create new products, then maybe we should revise the phrase even further to “Future – Function – Form.” This revised approach would place our future, represented by sustainability, at the forefront of our design thinking. It would encourage us to first ask ourselves, “What is the most sustainable way to design X?” and then consider how the function of X can be met while ensuring it remains non-harmful to people and the planet.

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023

The intersectionality of web performance

Web performance is an unalloyed good. No one has ever complained that a website is too fast.

So the benefit is pretty obvious. Users like fast websites. But there are other benefits to web performance. And they don’t all get equal airtime.

Business

A lot of good web performance practices come down to the first half of Postel’s Law: be conservative in what send. Images, fonts, JavaScript …remove what you don’t need and optimise the hell out of what’s left.

That can translate to savings. If you’re paying for the bandwidth every time a hefty file is downloaded, your monthly bill could get pretty big.

So apart from the indirect business benefits of happy users converting to happy customers, there can be a real nuts’n’bolts bottom-line saving to be made by having a snappy website.

Sustainability

This is related to the cost-savings benefit. If you’re shipping less stuff down the wire, and you’re optimising what you do send, then there’s less energy required.

Whether less energy directly translates to a smaller carbon footprint depends on how the energy is being generated. If your servers are running on 100% renewable energy sources, then reducing the output of your responses won’t reduce your carbon footprint.

But there’s an energy cost at the other end too. Think of all the devices making requests to your server. If you’re making those devices work hard—by downloading, parsing, executing lots of JavaScript, for example—then you’re draining battery life. And you can’t guarantee that the battery will be replenished from renewable energy sources.

That’s why sites like the website carbon calculator have so much crossover with web performance:

From data centres to transmission networks to the billions of connected devices that we hold in our hands, it is all consuming electricity, and in turn producing carbon emissions equal to or greater than the global aviation industry. Yikes!

Inclusivity

There comes a point when a slow website isn’t just inconvenient, it’s inaccessible.

I’ve always liked the German phrase for accessible: barrierefrei—free of barriers. With every file you add to a website’s dependencies, you’re adding one more barrier. Eventually the barrier is insurmountable for people with older devices or slower internet connections. If they can no longer access your website, your website is quite literally inaccessible.

Making the case

I’ve noticed that when it comes to making the argument in favour of better web performance, people often default to the business benefits.

I get it. We’re always being told to speak the language of business. The psychology seems pretty straightforward; if you think that the people you’re trying to convince are mostly concerned with the bottom line, use the language of commerce to change their minds.

But that’s always felt reductive to me.

Sure, those people almost certainly do care about the business. Who doesn’t? But they’re also humans. I feel like if really want to convince them, speak to their hearts. Show them the bigger picture.

Eliel Saarinen said:

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context; a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

I think the same could apply to making the case for web performance. Don’t stop at the obvious benefits. Go wider. Show the big-picture implications.

Monday, September 19th, 2022

CSS { In Real Life } | Web Sustainability and the Ethical Dilemma

But is it always the case that faster websites are greener websites? We reluctantly have to consider another facet: if making a website for a car manufacturer faster leads to an increase in the number of cars sold, can we really say that our website is greener?

This is very timely for me, given that Clearleft is currently engaged on a project that’s making me decidedly queasy for this exact reason—the success metrics of the project would be net negative for the world.

Sunday, January 16th, 2022

The computer built to last 50 years | ploum.net

A fascinating look at what it might take to create a truly sunstainable long-term computer.

Friday, July 31st, 2020

Pinboard is Eleven (Pinboard Blog)

I probably need to upgrade the Huffduffer server but Maciej nails why that’s an intimidating prospect:

Doing this on a live system is like performing kidney transplants on a playing mariachi band. The best case is that no one notices a change in the music; you chloroform the players one at a time and try to keep a steady hand while the band plays on. The worst case scenario is that the music stops and there is no way to unfix what you broke, just an angry mob. It is very scary.

Tuesday, December 4th, 2018

Rams — Gary Hustwit

The newest Gary Hustwit film is a documentary about Dieter Rams, featuring plinkity music by Brian Eno.

Rams is a design documentary, but it’s also a rumination on consumerism, materialism, and sustainability.

Tuesday, October 31st, 2017

On platforms and sustainability – confused of calcutta

JP Rangaswami also examines the rise of the platforms but he’s got some ideas for a more sustainable future:

A part of me wants to evoke Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander when it comes to building sustainable platforms. The platform “community” needs to be cared for and looked after, the living spaces they inhabit need to be designed to last. Multipurpose rather than monoculture, diverse rather than homogeneous . Prior industrial models where entire communities would rely on a single industry need to be learnt from and avoided. We shouldn’t be building the rust belts of the future. We should be looking for the death and life of great platforms, for a pattern language for sustainable platforms.

Sunday, February 28th, 2016

Hand Ax Technology - A Legend In Sustainability

Even more intriguing than their vast distribution across three continents is their time depth. Acheulean hand axes have been found at sites spanning 1.5 million years of human existence, dating from roughly 1.6 million years ago to about 100,000 years ago. That makes the Acheulean ax the most sustainable technology that members of our genus (Homo) ever developed. Consider, in contrast, the amount of technological change that has occurred in just the last 150 years (since the first telephone call), one ten-thousandth the amount of time the Acheulean hand ax was made and used. Or consider the amount of technological change in just the last 10 years (since the first iPhone was introduced), one one-hundred-fifty-thousandth the amount of time that Acheulean hand axes were made and used. In the memorable words of my former professor Arthur J. Jelinek, hand axes represent “mind-numbing technological stability.”

Monday, September 22nd, 2014

Perennial Design, by Wilson Miner · Issue 4 · The Manual

A deeply thoughtful piece (as always) by Wilson, on the mindset needed for a sustainable way of working.

When we start with the assumption that optimizing for rapid, unbounded growth is a goal, we immediately narrow the possibility space. There are only so many choices we can make that will get us there. The same choices that made annual monoculture and the shopping mall the most efficient engines for short-term growth and profit are the same qualities that made them unsustainable in the long term.

There are more ways to scale than growth. There are more ways to deepen our impact than just reaching more people. What if we put just as much effort into scaling the impact of our work over time? Can we build digital products around sustainable systems that survive long enough to outlive us, that are purpose-built to thrive without our constant cultivation?

Thursday, July 10th, 2014

Pinboard Turns Five (Pinboard Blog)

On the fifth anniversary of Pinboard, Maciej reflects on working on long-term projects:

Avoiding burnout is difficult to write about, because the basic premise is obnoxious. Burnout is a rich man’s game. Rice farmers don’t get burned out and spend long afternoons thinking about whether to switch to sorghum.

The good news is, as you get older, you gain perspective. Perspective helps alleviate burnout.

The bad news is, you gain perspective by having incredibly shitty things happen to you and the people you love. Nature has made it so that perspective is only delivered in bulk quantities. A railcar of perspective arrives and dumps itself on your lawn when all you needed was a microgram.

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

Subtraction.com: Built to Not Last

A spot-on analysis by Khoi of the changing perception of the value in product design, as exemplified by Apple.

Monday, March 19th, 2012

Why I’m building Nilai by Colin Devroe

Now this is some prioritisation I can admire:

I’m going to build valuable, reliable, sustainable web services that will last forever.