Links, quotes & articles (Week 21, 2024)

A really thoughtful post by Chris How over at Clearleft urging project teams to give environmental considerations a more prominent role in their project planning activities. By involving the planet as a stakeholder, setting climate budgets for digital products, and measuring impact, teams can work towards more sustainable design practices.

Invite the planet to your design critiques and code reviews

Jim Nielsen makes the argument for small efforts, not matter how insignificant they may seem. This is something I come across a lot when talking to folks about website sustainability - "my site is so small, it won't have any impact". Yes, the impact might not be the same as a change made by a Google or Cloudflare, but there's still an impact nonetheless and that should still be acknowledged.

... we can be judgmental of small efforts because they don’t have the impact of giant platform companies — “If all I can do is recycle this one water bottle, that’s not enough. Clearing the ocean of all plastics is the only acceptable measure of success.” That’s a case of giant-platform thinking that poisons your individual thinking and action, e.g. “any small effort on my part accomplishes nothing and is therefore pointless”. When you start to think of everything in terms of scale and impact, what can any one individual meaningfully do?

Michael Andersen has put out a study that explores energy consumption of image formats on the web. He starts with the question "are lighter, more modern image formats always better?" and then goes about testing this by measuring the energy used by the browser to render images. His work makes use of the Firefox Profiler, however there are some key limitations to this which have been raised in these two great comment threads on LinkedIn. TL;DR - GIF turns out to be more energy efficient in most tests, though there are caveats.

A fantastic GreenIO podcast episode taking a look at the European legislative process as it relates to digital services and environmental impacts. An interesting glance behind the curtain of the lobbying and work involved to pass some of the world's leading digital sustainability laws.

You know, one of the major difficulties working on digital affairs is that there's not many discussions in society around these topics for generally whether we want them or not. And I think it was very clear during the Artificial Intelligence Act, at some point, we were at a point where a majority of the parliament, because of lobbyists, big tech lobbyists, set general purpose AI, generative AI, and foundation models like ChatGPT and DALI from the AI Act.