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Your round-up of design thinking news and opportunities, to improve your practice.

Welcome to Design Thoughts! I’m Charlie, a freelance service designer. This newsletter is a round-up of thoughts, news and opportunities.

Cutting out the digital waste

Gerry Mcgovern helps reduce data waste by designing simpler, lighter, more environmentally-friendly websites. He also writes about the topic, he wrote; 'World Wide Waste: How Digital Is Killing Our Planet—and What We Can Do About It'.

This week a colleague shared his 'Digital Waste Audit' site with me. Gerry has already done the research and thinking around how we reduce our digital waste. All we have to do is action it! There are 33 suggestions of how to reduce digital waste, and lower carbon emissions. And these can be applied to your work as a designer. This isn't so much about personal, individual responsibility. It's more about taking digital waste into consideration when designing digital services.

In future we should take a similar approach to sustainability as we have started to take towards designing accessible services. It won't just be the domain of accessibility experts or specialist green designers, it will be embedded into everyone's practice. Accessibility experts and specialist green designers will always be important too. They advocate and lead best practice for this type of work. But it's all of our responsibility.

Create digital content that uses least energy possible

The heavier digital is, the more pollution it creates. Imagine if you wanted to communicate to someone: “Thank you for your message.” Let’s assume that sending this message by SMS creates 1 unit of CO2:

• Email: 285 times more CO2 than SMS
• Audio: 7,000 times more CO2
• Standard definition video: 53,000 times more CO2
• High-definition video: 82,000 more CO2

So where possible, the way we communicate to our users should be a CO2 light as possible. Less is more.

Use appropriate metadata on everything you publish

If you want your data and content to get found, you must have good metadata. As the quantity of data increases, the need for information architecture increases. Having good metadata means people spend less time online searching for the content they're looking for, creating less waste.

Regularly reusing things (content, images, code etc.) rather than creating new stuff

Reusing and repairing and holding onto things as long as possible are essential if we are to truly address the climate emergency. We must break away from the environmentally destructive culture of relentless creating and consuming. It’s great for the planet if you reuse. We must embrace circular economy thinking, and that means reusing as much as possible. Always do your research before you create. Reuse should always be the first thing you explore.

Digital waste explained is here. I'll be following at least 3 of the steps in the guide before the next newsletter is out, and I'll report back.

What I've been pondering

Kelechi Okafor has written her debut book; Edge of Here, Stories from Near to Now. This sci-fi had me absolutely transfixed. Kelechi describes alternate realities in which racism and technology collide. In one chapter; White people have an 'Ally-chip' to experience racism first-hand, only to then get angry with Black people when the chip experiences are unpleasant and painful. The stories she tells are bold and some are beautiful and uplifting. They make me think of sci-fi writing being an interesting medium of speculative design, to explore issues that are difficult but vital to understand and face.

Opportunities

Service Designer

Refugee Action

Salaried role, 35 hours per week, £35,678-£38,285 (London weighting £4,044)

​Apply here​

Lead Service Designer

Office for National Statistics

£55,803

​Apply here​