"What I've learned is that there's vast amounts of wasted data in nearly every website and application." This episode features an episode with Tom Greenwood, the creator of the website carbon calculator, as we discuss all things sustainable web design and the impact and waste of digital products. Tune in to learn which steps to take towards a carbon-efficient digital world directly from a true expert.
"What I've learned is that there's vast amounts of wasted data in nearly every website and application." This episode features an episode with Tom Greenwood, the creator of the website carbon calculator, as we discuss all things sustainable web design and the impact and waste of digital products. Tune in to learn which steps to take towards a carbon-efficient digital world directly from a true expert.
Tom: (00:03)
Looking to the future where we really need to go is actually looking at a) like how do we make those technologies super efficient? But b) like maybe start challenging the culture in a broader sense and asking like, is this the direction we wanna be going as a society that we’re all like living inside 3D worlds and completely lose sight of reality? So, I mean, I don’t think I have the power to necessarily influence the culture on that grand scale, but I feel like it’s a conversation that we need to be having openly. Is this really where we wanna be going? And is that really good for us?
Christine: (00:38)
Welcome to the Lost in Transformation podcast series dedicated to the complex world of Digital Transformation. We feature guests from large corporations, start-ups, consultancies, and more, to shed light on the success factors around Innovation, Transformation, and adjacent topics. We share first-hand insights and inspiration from experts for all the intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, and anyone curious about Digital Transformation.
Christine: (01:07)
Hi, I’m Christine, the Marketing Manager at MING Labs, and today, together with MING’s COO Sebastian, I’m talking to Tom Greenwood, the Managing Director at Wholegrain Digital, and also the creator of the website carbon calculator. We dive deeper into the impact and the waste of digital products, the mindset shift towards a more sustainable web, and what first steps we can take towards a carbon-efficient digital world. We hope you enjoy this episode!
Christine: (01:36)
Hi Tom, we're very excited to have you on our podcast today on Lost in Transformation and thank you so much for taking the time. And you are the Managing Director at Wholegrain Digital, which is also basically a web design agency that helps positive organizations thrive. And we're very excited to hear more about your work with design and sustainability today, especially your journey with the creation of the website carbon calculator in this episode today. And to start off, we're happy to learn more about yourself first. Could you perhaps share more about your background and your experience, everything that brought you to where you are today?
Tom: (02:17)
Sure. So thank you for having me here. So I originally studied industrial design at university and I had this sort of vision of having a career in designing like physical things that sort of people could hold and that they fall in love with and that enrich their lives. But I was also really concerned about environmental issues. And so as I went through the few years after university designing things, I was trying to find opportunities to design things in more environmentally friendly ways, but I was really struggling to kind of see how I could kind of align my environmental sort of views with my sort of career in industrial design. And this was in the like early two thousand. And then I sort of started like dabbling in digital things and, and getting really excited by this idea that like digital doesn't exist, right?
Tom: (03:11)
Like you don't have to dig things out of the ground and like forge them in factories and then ship them across the world. And then at the end of their life, you don't toss them in the bin. They're just on screen, they don't really exist. So, I started being really excited about digital designs and the opportunities they have to transform society, people's life. But in a way, it was not really that damaging in the environment like physical products. So, it took me into the world of digital, and I ended up starting or co-founding digital as a sort of design and development agency, specifically working with organizations that are trying to do something that sort of positive environmentally or socially or both, and helped them kind of get the best out of digital design and technology. And that sort of what I've been doing for the last 15 years is running the Wholegrain Digital and sort of trying to find ways that we can run our own business in a way that's like socially responsible and progressive as well as environmentally responsible. How we can like work with really positive clients? But then also like in only in the last few years asking some harder questions about, is there an environmental impact of digital? Cause I was sort of assuming there wasn't and the last few years started asking some harder questions about that and looking at, you know, what is that impact? How do we quantify it? How do we reduce it? And trying to, not only about ourselves within our team, but also spread that message to the wider industry.
Christine: (04:42)
The super interesting path is also to understand your background in sustainable business and design and also how you kind of challenges that impact aspect here as well. And I think that's perhaps also what guided you to write a book if I'm not wrong.
Tom: (04:59)
Yeah, that's right. So, my book "Sustainable web design" was published at the beginning of this year. So I was writing it for the sort of from the end of 2019 until the end of last year through the first year of the pandemic really, which was tough writing a book while I tried to run an agency. But the reason I wrote it was because this is like the issue of the environmental impact of digital technology is something that really isn't talked about. There are a lot of hot topics in the world. There's like performance topics around, you know, like search engine optimization, user experience, and so on. There are also kinda some ethical topics that are fairly in terms of like accessibility, privacy, and security, but the environment is just not part of the conversation. So, having spent a few years researching, and digging fairly deep on trying t figure out what potential solutions might be. I felt like writing a book on the topic might be like one step towards trying to make this part of the conversation within the digital industry. And, I'm really pleased that actually, it does seem to have had a, you know, positive impact. It's got a lot of good attention and there's a lot of companies coming back to us now with feedback saying that now this is something that's on their agenda. So that's exciting.
Christine: (06:18)
Yeah. That's amazing to hear how you were an author on "Sustainable web design" basically next to your job at wholegrain digital during the pandemic. I think that's an interesting story and I'll definitely need to check that out. And since you've been working in the field of sustainable business and greening the internet for quite a while already, I can also imagine you're pretty much seeing firsthand the changes and also how businesses can be used as a force for good to kind of positive impact the environment. I think that's super interesting to kind of understand the change in more detail here. If we now look closer at your journey, the website carbon calculator today, could you let us know a bit how things used to work before you came up with the solution and before the whole journey started? What did the status quo of websites and the internet in terms of sustainability look like, or might still look like today?
Tom: (07:14)
Yeah, sure. So if you go back about five years, I mean, there was almost no conversation at all about the environmental impact of digital technology. So one of the few things out there, there was a campaign by Green Peace called Click Clean, where they were trying to put some pressure on the big tech companies to open up and talk about their energy consumption and carbon emissions and so on. And then the kind of the lone voice, I'd say the lone voice in the wilderness was [...] of mine. And he had an agency [...] talking about this. Well now he's been talking about probably like seven or eight years, I guess. So he talking about when I stumbled, but there were a couple of things. There was very little out there. So not only was there no awareness that there even was an environmental impact, but even the people who had started talking about it didn't know how to quantify it.
Tom: (08:12)
So it's like, okay, we know that digital products and services use energy. And we know that like with you added all up, there's a lot of energy consumed. That's sort of what Green Peace was saying in their campaign. We know it's a lot of energy, but we don't have transparency. We dunno exactly how much it's. So as Wholegrain sort of decided that we need to figure this out, we need to find a way of actually quantifying the amount of energy used for projects that we do. Because if we don't have any way of actually measuring what're we doing, then it's very difficult to know, are we doing well? Are we doing badly? If we make changes, have we made things better or worse? What are we aiming for? So we did a lot of research. We found out that there were actually a couple of papers that had been published.
Tom: (08:55)
There are some fairly unknown, but there were a couple of papers that had been published on energy consumption by digital products. And so we took those and developed our own methodology on top of those, of like, how can you actually quantify energy consumption and therefore carbon emissions of a website specifically sort of what we designed [...]. And then we created an online version that originally was just like a spreadsheet for internal use on our own projects. And then we thought, well, you know, this needs to be a public thing. We need to raise awareness. Everybody needs to be thinking about this. So we created a public tool, which you put online at the website, carbon.com, where you can just put in a web address and it will do an assessment and you an estimate of the energy and the carbon emission.
Tom: (09:37)
So that was like a really big step forward. Cause we kinda went from nothing. There's no way of quantifying it to actually having something online. That's very simple that anybody could use and since then we've evolved it. So, you know, we've got the sort of the manual version of it and the spreadsheet still there because the nice thing about doing it manually is if you've got the time and the knowledge you can actually like really refine it and learn a lot more. But the simple tool I think is a really good starting point. And we've updated that we updated it a couple of years ago with new data because actually, this field has started getting some momentum. There are a lot more studies being done. So once there were new studies out, we were able to update the [...], and we're doing the same thing again. We've been doing a lot of research over the past year and we're gonna publish some updates in the coming months with new data and kinda hopefully improve the tool a bit to actually give you more insights into like the practical actions you could take to reduce energy and emissions. So that's sort of where we've come from. We've come from this sort of world where no one was talking about it and there was no way of measuring anything. So now actually five years later, there's a lot of people talking about it and there are ways of quantifying it. And I think that's kind of where we need to be, so I think where the industry's getting on track.
Christine: (10:52)
It's super fascinating how far you've already come along the way, basically, as you saying, from having that lone voice on the internet to accelerating the whole movement and having ways to quantify it, I think that's really impressive. And you've already touched on a couple of factors already, but what would you say served as the main catalyst for change for you to then really act and decide to take on such a big transformation project and come up with this carbon calculator?
Tom: (11:20)
The main catalyst for change for us was actually the B impact assessment, which is the assessment for a company to cert as a B corporation. I dunno if you're familiar with B corporations, but it's essentially a kind of a rigorous standard to show that a company is being run in a way that's socially responsible and environmentally be responsible. And in the assessment, asks you lots of questions about all different aspects of your business, including data, like asking you to input data about the environmental impact of the products that you manufacture. So it's like assuming that you manufacture a physical product, like what materials are you using? Like how much energy is used in production and how are you reducing the amount of waste? And like all of these kinds of things that, that you'd hope people looking at when they're designing physical products, but because we don't make physical products, this didn't really to us, but it's still in the assessment.
Tom: (12:14)
So we asked the assessors, what should we do with the section? Should we just leave it blank? And they said, yes, leave it blank. Cause it doesn't apply to digital products. And I think most people probably would've left it there and we did leave it there for our first assessment when we applied to become a big corporation. But it kinda left this nagging doubt in my mind, we left it blank, but that kind of feels wrong. Cause we don't know the answer. Like we're saying that the answer is zero to all of the environmental impacts and maybe it is zero, but we're not basing that on any evidence. We're just making an assumption. So that was the catalyst that it really bothered me, that we made the assumption and wanted to find some real to prove that that was the case. And what we found was actually the opposite. So instead of the answer being zero, what we found was that the internet as a whole, as a machine that kinda spans the entire globe accounts for 2% percent of global carbon emission. And, you might say, well, that doesn't sound much, but the global aviation industry is 2% of carbon emissions worldwide. So, you know, the internet, aviation basically equivalent in terms of the total greenhouse gas output. So once we learn that, we're like, okay, well, if we need to tackle aviation, we also need to tackle digital, right?
Christine: (13:33)
It's crazy how much of an impact or how big of an impact this actually has. So this is like a super interesting thing to tackle and it's good. You kind of didn't wanna rely on assumptions, but you really wanted that data there. I think it's super insightful to hear about the start of the journey and how you then come in to help drive transformation forward and also how businesses to be a part of a positive change in the world. And I'd kind of like to circle back on your approach, basically how the website carbon calculator works in more detail and how it especially helps drive sustainable transformation today. Could you guide us through your first approaches to how the project was taken on in the early days of the journey, just to help us get a better understanding of how it all started or worked?
Tom: (14:20)
Sure. So, the starting point was to try to find a metric of how do you actually correlate some sort of measurable metric of a digital product with an amount of electricity consumed. Cause ultimately like all digital services are powered by electricity. So this is quite challenging and it's still very, very challenging, but the research that had been done and since then nearly all of the research that's been done kinda academically into this field has used a metric, which is kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per gigabyte of data. So that kinda provides us with a base point where we can say, okay, well, if we've got research that tells us that this amount of electricity is used for every gigabyte of data consumed, then we can start to actually kind extrapolate that out. These have different system boundaries, is basically like how much of the network are you actually accounting for?
Tom: (15:19)
And what we wanna do in our assessment is look at the wider system boundaries possible. So you've got like the data center, the energy use there, you've got the transmission networks, the send the data from the data center across the world to some end-user somewhere who wants to access the website. And then you've got the electricity used on their phone, on their laptop, or whatever device they're using. And potentially if you wanted to widen the system, even you could also kinda account for the proportion of the energy, of actually like building the internet. You can include that or not include that depending on your philosophy there. But what we want is white system boundaries. We want this metric of electricity per gigabyte to cover all of those stages. And once we've got that, then you're in a position where actually you can start to do calculations based upon the amount of data used by your product, whether, you know, in our case it's websites, but you could do it for an app or like a streaming service, for example, and then to turn into carbon emissions, then you've got local carbon factors for electricity.
Tom: (16:22)
For every country in the world, there's like an official carbon factor, which basically says for every kilowatt-hour of electricity used, this is the amount of CO2 equivalent produced by the power stations in that country. So you can either do that on a like country basis. So if you know that your website is hosted and visited by people in the UK or Germany or Singapore, you could use the carbon factor for the relevant country, or you could use a global carbon factor. And the international energy agency publishes annually. They publish a figure for like the world average amount of CO2 out electricity. So basically you can like add all loose things together and then it becomes relatively simple arithmetic. So to just scale them up and you can just put that in a spreadsheet and then it's fairly straightforward. The next challenge is then how do you automate? Because what you need to do is find a way of putting a web address in and knowing like the amount of data consumed and then being able to do so that was a bit of a headache, but actually, Google Lighthouse has that data. So in the end, [...] we ended up using Google Lighthouse, so measure the data consumed and fit it into our system.
Christine: (17:34)
Yeah. It does sound challenging to get there actually, to have that amount of electricity use and then see, okay, what is the equivalent to that you actually produce also? I think for someone like me, who's not doing this, like in my role, I think this sounds super challenging. But it's really interesting to understand your work here in general, especially knowing now what a great tool it is today to drive positive change in the field of sustainability and also kind of seeing how your background with design sustainable business kind of flows into it. And you were already mentioning the first approaches in your work and also some challenges that you see, what would you say are quite common challenges that came up when working on a solution to the kind of make the internet greener that you saw. You already mentioned automation. Were there other challenges that came up?
Tom: (18:27)
I think in terms of actually building the calculator, once we cracked that kinda automation, it was relatively straightforward. The biggest issue we hit was scaling. So we didn't really know whether anybody was gonna be interested in this at all. Cause we were creating it in a world where no one was even talking about the environs and products. So there was no market for this tool. So initially it was very much, you know, we just thought let's just build something and see if anyone uses it. We were nicely surprised that actually did get, you know, a reasonable amount of traffic, but nothing that caused any kinda performance issues. When we launched version two of it a couple of years ago, suddenly the amount of usage we were getting increased significantly. And then through the last two years, I think the pandemic has also spurred a lot of interest in like the environmental impact of digital technology,
Tom: (19:19)
cause a lot of people have moved to like working from home and doing video calls and there's been a lot of conversation about, is that good for the environment now that people are commuting less and so on. So I think that's like being a real catalyst for people taking interest in the topic and that's then driven people to find our carbon calculator and use it a lot more. So I mean the amount of traffic has skyrocketed, you know, we've done several million tests now. And so this year, as we've really had the headache of like hitting the limits of like what it can be handled, cuz there's just so many tests being run through it, which is a problem that we've been kind of gradually like chipping away, aligning out and trying to kinda keep ahead of the issue. But the other problem is kinda on a business side in order to actually solve those problems.
Tom: (20:03)
We need the time to solve those problems. And this is something that we've done really as a passion project, we've done it to like educate ourselves. So we've done it to raise awareness within the industry, but we don't make any money after this. It's a free service. You can just go on online and use it. So any work that we do is basically kinda us doing it voluntarily because we wanna offer the service. So it's been challenging when we are like really busy with client projects and the agency and then where like, you know, suddenly you get a burst of traffic and we hit like the next level of like scaling problems that we have to try and carve out that time to say, OK, we're gonna actually focus on this. So I think that's been a real challenge for us kinda commercially rather than technically, which has been interesting. But we're getting that. We're getting that.
Christine: (20:52)
Yeah. I think it's kind of fascinating to hear now looking back at how you thought in the beginning, Okay, no one gonna be interested in the solution and then how it actually developed into being this solution that is finding more and more useful now. And also how you said how COVID has kind of contributed to more usage of technology in general. So I think you were kind of at the forefront of putting that out there or you had good timing probably. You were an early adopter there, so I think that's super interesting. I would say now looking back on your journey so far with the website carbon calculator and your experience working with change and transformation of the internet, there's probably a lot of things that you also learned along the way, too. What would you say all in all is your biggest learning or your biggest takeaway from the journey? Anything that you would like to specifically highlight?
Tom: (21:40)
I think the biggest learning really is around the actual kind of the learnings in what we're doing in design and development that impact the emissions. So the biggest learning to me is how much waste there is in a digital product. So you, because they're virtual, you don't really think about the concept of waste. So like when you buy something physical and you like unwrap it and there's all this packaging and you have it and, oh God that's waste. But when you use a digital product and there's no visible waste, you don't really think about it. But actually, I think what I've learned is that there are vast amounts of wasted data in nearly every website, nearly every application. So it's sort of, you know like there's code in there that doesn't really do anything useful. There are technologies that are just inherently inefficient, that don't need that.
Tom: (22:27)
There are better ways of doing things, much more efficiently. People are designing content that's actually just got a lot of information in there that doesn't need to be there. They're using pictures and videos and you know, things that are not actually adding value to the user. So they're not good for anybody. That's what I mean by waste is like it's consuming data, it's consuming energy, but it doesn't really serve anybody's interest. And actually now kind of looking at digital design more through a kind of zero waste mindset of saying, okay, well, how can we actually do the most with the least? And really focus on delivering the user's needs with the minimum amount of code, the minimum amount of server resources, the minimum amount of media, like the images, video, all your recordings and so to deliver like really, really good. You end up designing things, better user experience, delivering better commercial outcomes, but at the same time, it's better for the environment. So it's like this kind of win, win, win. When you look at it through this kind of zero waste mindset for me, that's the biggest learning is actually there's a really exciting opportunity to create a better web, not just to make it better for the environment.
Christine: (23:33)
Yeah. I think it's super interesting to see how also the mindset is shifting, you are already saying, okay, there's that zero-waste mindset. And I think also to see how much waste there is with digital products and how you're saying, okay, all this waste is like content and data, et cetera. And I think how that mindset is going away from having a lot of cool, engaging, fun content on websites, but actually making it more sustainable. I think that shift is probably happening right now or is gonna be happening more in the future.
Tom: (24:04)
Yeah. Yeah. And just going back to your sort of earlier question about challenges. One of the challenges is that people increasingly like think people want gimmicks. When I say people, I mean like web designers, like, you know, fun gimmicky things because they just wanna [...]. The challenge is how do you make the user experience actually really, really good. So people do fall in love with it. It's not like some like eco website that's really dull, and nobody actually enjoys it, but it's not really energy efficient. How do you actually make it so that people love it in a meaningful way, it's also really energy efficient? And sometimes that means challenging the gimmicks because they're not actually serving anybody cause they hence their gimmicks, but actually saying, but we can still make it fun. We can still make it a kind of a rich visual experience, but we can just do it in a really thoughtful way where every detail is really considered both in terms of why we're doing it and how it's serving users, but also the technology and how we can use that technology in the most efficient way.
Christine: (25:10)
I really like how you highlight the fact that these sustainable experiences don't necessarily need to be in contrast to a good user experience or how can we actually make it fun and engaging, but sustainable at the same time? I think that's probably also the challenge here as you were highlighting and it's great to hear about all the successful parts and the takeaways as well. But on the other hand, working with transformation, then implementing initiatives that are completely new, that also rely on the effort of businesses to actively change something on their platforms, I can imagine that that must be difficult too. So yeah, that's probably not everything that went smoothly along the journey. Do you have maybe a mistake in mind that you made or anything that didn't work out the way that you expected to?
Tom: (25:59)
I think, well, a couple of our early mistakes were: one was assuming that people would care about the environmental aspect, but a lot of people it's like it's not their priority. The reason that they're paying for a website is not to save the environment. They're paying for a website, cuz they've got some commercial goals they need to achieve. And even if they do on pair about the, on a personal level, that's not why they're spending money on a website. So that was definitely an early mistake about, you know, we had to learn that we need to sell this to people in their own language and focus on the things that they care about. So that meant actually seeing where there was a synergy between like the environmental aspects and serving their commercial goals. And there are those synergies, as I mentioned earlier, that you can actually create better user experiences.
Tom: (26:48)
And by using this kinda lens of zero waste and energy efficiency, the other aspect was the other thing I just mentioned about environmentally friendly web products needing to be just as good or better from a user point of view than a standard web product. So if you make it this kind of Spartan, austere like very kinda pared back, I mean, a pared-back design could be great, but if you go too far and make it feel like an eco website, it's not gonna appeal to anybody. And actually one of the things that I've always believed in since, you know when even when I was back doing industrial design, was that if environmentally for any products are niche products that only appeal to like really environmentally minded people, then ultimately that's a bit pointless because if the majority of people are buying non-eco-friendly things,
Tom: (27:45)
and then a few like eco mind, people are buying these super environmental friendly things, the environment's still screwed. So what we need is like, we need the mainstream to be more environmentally friendly rather than for eco-friendly to be a niche. And that was, even though I'd been thinking that and talking about that in terms of like industrial design since like the early thousand, I did slip back into that mistake when we started doing kinda eco-friendly digital design and we did a few designs that just didn't work, including our version of our own website. We designed our own websites, make them super, super energy efficient, and our leads and our sales plummeted too, And then we had to redesign it and actually challenge ourselves to say, OK, now we need to go the other way. And actually like keep it eco-friendly, but make it even better than our old website, the previous one, which we did and then, you know, sales went the other way. So that was a great learning experience, but it came from making that mistake that you can't make, if you design for that niche of people who just care about the environment and they don't care what it looks like, they're not too worried about functionality, but it's not gonna work.
Christine: (28:53)
I think these are great learnings or basically mistakes that turned into takeaways, as you were saying. Not expecting that people would care about environmental aspects, but actually finding that synergy and so on. I think that's super interesting to keep in mind. And now that the solution already exists, it's up and running, we're also quite curious about what success actually looks like for you with the website carbon calculator. How do you measure your success or how do you know whether you're successful with the tool?
Tom: (29:27)
Yeah, sure. I mean, to some extent it's by the number of people using it. And we've seen that you know, as I mentioned, that's been like kind of significantly increasing and we've had huge amounts of traffic and is steadily growing. So that's one metric of success. The elementary of success is seeing how many briefs come through the door to us as an agency that talks about wanting their websites to be lower energy or lower carbon. Because until early last year, we'd never seen a brief. I mean, it wasn't even a topic of conversation. So we'd never had a brief through that actually, had this as a requirement, you might see things, you know, you'd see all the standard functional requirements in the brief. There might be things in there about accessibility and inclusivity, but you'd never see anything about the environment. So one of the success metrics is like, how many briefs do we get, but actually mentioned this and that's been steadily increasing.
Tom: (30:18)
The first brief we ever had that mentioned it, I think was January 2020 and that's been steadily increasing. And you know, we've even had some projects now where that was like, not just on the brief, it was actually the key criteria. So that's a big thing. And then the kind related metrics of that is like how many other agencies are receiving these briefs as well, where being asked that they've to consider kinda the environmental aspects of what they're building and design and how many of those agencies are then starting to actually like change the way they're doing design and development and starting to talk about this as part of their own design process. And we're seeing more and more agencies as well as like freelancers and so on. And in-house teams starting to talk about this and it seems to be getting a lot of momentum. So I think that they're the success metrics really that If you can see the industry-changing both in terms of the client demand and the service is offered by other people that means something's working. Yeah. I think
Christine: (31:15)
It's very interesting to see how the success is growing and how you're actually looking at it with tangible metrics. And yes, seeing the impact there and now looking at the future and looking at your work in driving sustainable change and your work in greening the internet through design and sustainable practices, what is your future outlook here? Is there anything that you're especially looking forward to or anything significant that you see coming?
Tom: (31:42)
So I think the thing that I see coming is the mainstreaming of this topic. And I think that's really the end. That's not the end goal, but that's like, I think that's like the key point we want to get to where, although it's not necessarily our interests as Wholegrain Digital, we want to make this topic no longer in a niche. At the moment it's like this niche started to get momentum and that's good for us because we are like leading the field. But what we want to get to is a point where actually this is not. And you can go to any web design agency or any in-house digital team, and this will just be part of their workflow. So that's sort of the next level, is like sort of trying to [...] our own expertise by sharing it so widely that it becomes not.
Tom: (32:27)
And if we get to the point where actually it's like it no longer seems special, I think that will be a huge sign of success. And at that point, we'll obviously look to like well, how do we go even further? But yeah, that's the point at which it's no longer a unique selling point I think is a key area of success. But then the other thing looking to the future is like, where is digital technology going in a broader sense? So we, you know, we agency, we focus on websites, but I think the web, is increasingly gonna be less about websites and more about other types applications, you know. We're obviously hearing, Facebook is rebranding itself as a metaverse company. And these kinds of new uses of technology are gonna be consuming far more computer resources, network resources than the traditional websites. Cause there's so much more complex, you know, like rendering whole worlds in 3d, for example. So I think like looking to the future where we really need to go is actually A: looking at how do we make those technologies super-efficient, but B: like maybe start challenging the culture in a broader sense and asking like, is this the direction we wanna be going as a society, that we're all like living inside 3d worlds and completely lose sight of reality.
Tom: (33:41)
So, I mean, I don't think I have the power to like necessarily the culture on that grand scale, but I feel like it's a conversation that we need to be having openly, like, is this really where we wanna be going? Is that really good for us?
Christine: (33:56)
I think those are really exciting outlooks and how you're also challenging the direction that we're going into and is this really what we want or should we, you know, look at it from a different perspective. And I also think it's funny how you were mentioning the fact that you are offering actually when it doesn't seem so special or unique anymore, that this is success for you. But I mean, it sounds contradictory, but in a way, that's also like the success that you would like to achieve. So yeah, I think those are really cool outlooks for the future. Sebastian, do you have anything that you wanna throw in there?
Sebastian: (34:30)
I'd just be curious because obviously we're in a quite similar field and we all need to talk to our clients about what it means to design for a brighter future. And so in this particular context and for obviously a carbon-efficient kinda digital and it's set up, what are the first steps that somebody could very concretely take in the organization to maybe raise awareness and get started on this?
Tom: (35:00)
Sure. I think there are only two things that sit together. One is to actually just take some time to start having the conversation with the clients, to separate from any projects that might be happening. Just have the conversation with the clients to introduce them to the topic of the fact that digital products consume energy and that results in carbon emissions actually just give them like a half-hour presentation or something to introduce 'em to that topic, help them understand that this is like a real thing. It's actually a significant issue that needs to be tackled. But then like the second half of that conversation is to show them how tackling that issue is gonna serve their, their commercial interests. You know, looking at websites, for example, if you make things more efficient, you make things faster which improves user experience can get better conversion rates.
Tom: (35:50)
You can get better search engine rankings, you can reduce your server costs because you've made things a lot more [...], you need resources. Like there are a lot of tangible commercial benefits that come as a result of kinda looking through this lens of efficiency. So I think having like dedicating time to just like educate them about this is a topic we wanna put on your radar and let you know about it. But then also that back into the things that they really care about so that they can see them taking interest in this topic is gonna not just be good for the world, but it's gonna be good for them.
Sebastian: (36:22)
Good. Cool. Yeah.
Sebastian: (36:24)
I think that's a good first step to kind of dive into the topic. Right. I think that's basically all about the journey of the website carbon calculator for today. Tom, thank you so much for sharing all about the journey and your expertise in creating this tool, the website carbon calculator, and how also explaining how you're challenging the way that we look at technology and how we'll also use it in the future. It's been really exciting to hear how we can use design and technology to make sustainable change in the world. And it's been a pleasure having you on today. Thank you again.
Tom: 37:01)
Great. It's been a pleasure.
Christine:: (37:03)
Thank you for listening to this episode of Lost in Transformation. If you enjoy our podcast, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a review on iTunes. Join us next time for another episode of our podcast.