Sustainable web design is permaculture
This post was originally published on StayDiligent.com.
Diligent takes the long view in most things so it follows that we strive for sustainability in our own operations as well as what we provide to clients. Since pixels are pretty different from toothbrushes, sustainable web design is pretty different than sustainable industrial design.
Web designers have been late to the conversation
Five years ago, sustainability was everywhere. You couldn't toss a baby polar bear without hitting a magazine rack full of Green Issues. The design community hotly debated what materials and practices were and weren't "sustainable". Except web designers. I'm not sure if we weren't invited or if we declined, but the reason was the same: we didn't have those problems. We made virtual stuff.A couple years later, somebody calculated the web's energy use and carbon footprint. It was bad. In some contexts, reading an article online consumed more resources than the same article on paper.
The alarm was sounded. Trade mags released articles like "Guidelines for Green Web Design" and "Saving the planet through sustainable web design." There were more, but these two sum up the conventional wisdom—the designer's role is to reduce the site's carbon footprint.
It's a worthy goal (and luckily consistent with improving user experience as fewer, smaller files increase site performance) but it feels like asking industrial designers to use less plastic: square one.
Sustainability is a moving target
Meanwhile, the concept of sustainable design deepened and matured. The Designer's Accord completed their 5-year mission "to mainstream sustainability in the global creative community." The Living Principles provided a framework for "the four streams of sustainability – environment, people, economy, and culture."Culture? Back the truck up. I thought we were saving the planet.
We still are, but modern measurements of sustainability examine multiple categories (environmental, social, economic) over multiple stages (extraction, production, distribution, operation/maintenance, and eventually disposal). The environmental impacts of data delivery is a particularly narrow slice of sustainable web design.
Makes sense. Isn't a site is more likely to disappear due to the social impacts of maintenance (i.e. the over-worked staff have no time to update the blog) than a webserver's energy use?
If you visited the above link to the Designer's Accord, you'll see that they're shutting down because "continuing to build on a solution formulated in 2007 is not the right answer anymore." It took only five years for the site to go from cutting-edge to irrelevant. In the same time span, a corkscrew I bought my wife went from functional to essential (related: we had a kid).
The impermanence of the web irks me because it is—more than any medium to date—naturally suited to evolve and adapt. If we loathe the planned obsolescence of electronic devices as unsustainable, why do we keep launching sites we know we'll completely redo in three to five years? Why do clients keep buying them?
That is the real question—how do we create digital assets that are, in a word, sustainable?
The web is more property than product
The typical life-cycle stages like extraction and disposal don't make much sense applied to the web. Are there pixel mines? Pixel landfills?Information architecture is not a misnomer. We are creating the structure that information will inhabit for a long time, just like a building. You may paint the walls and swap out the furniture, but knocking down a wall or remodeling the kitchen shouldn't be a commonplace activity. That cost isn't negated by virtuality. If you constantly change your site's URL structure, you'll either hemorrhage traffic or have to set up lots of redirects.
A website is more of a property than a product. We develop it, maintain it, renovate it. Sustainable web design is really more like land use. So let's talk permaculture. Permaculture is a branch of design that specializes in sustainable architecture and agriculture. They have their own Design Principles.
I challenge you to read these and not get excited about how they could be incorporated into web design. Many of them sound like lessons we've already learned going from table layouts to web standards and responsive grids, from slicing up mock-ups to pattern libraries and symbol fonts, or from waterfall to agile and A/B testing.
- Observe & interact
- Catch & store energy
- Obtain a yield
- Apply self-regulation & accept feedback
- Use & value renewable resources & services
- Produce no waste
- Design from patterns to details
- Integrate rather than segregate
- Use small & slow solutions
- Use & value diversity
- Use edges & value the marginal
- Creatively use & respond to change
Others recommend solutions for challenges we continue to face.
"Obtain a yield" captures something Diligent tells all of our clients. Your website should be a positive endeavor, providing value to your organization and not sucking up time and money. In the end, it needs to be worth it.
"Catch & store energy" and "Integrate rather than segregate" answers the question of whether to launch a new site or build out the current one. It seldom makes sense for the hot new thing to exist completely on its own. It's an uphill climb for search rankings and the parent site sees no benefit if it's a smashing success.
"Use small & slow solutions" is about making changes easy, simple, and constant. This applies to optimizing buttons or headlines using multivariate testing, but also streamlining content curation. No one should need $500 design software to update a menu.
"Use & value diversity" and "Use edges & value the marginal" are blowing my mind a little bit. In an ecosystem, biodiversity increases resilience (think potato famine) and edge effects of adjacent habitats like coastlines or clearings increase biodiversity and ease migration. I'm loving trying to imagine some examples for the web... maybe content delivery networks as a defense against denial-of-service attacks?
Honestly, "Creatively use & respond to change" should be the guiding light of every web project. It's what the web does best and any site not considering how to change over time is sword fighting left-handed.
If these ideas are something you want to talk more about with us, we will be at Compostmodern this Friday and Saturday. We've been going since 2008 and Stanley and Martha met for the first time at one. Or you can always reach out to us via email or Twitter.