This is not great news.

The cookies of the million most visited websites produce more than 11,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions per month!

UX design and sustainability are hot topics, seeking to solve problems that affect everyone. Digital life has an incredibly negative impact on the environment because of carbon emissions from the huge amount of electricity required to run the Internet.

This is great news. If you want to know more about the impact of digital tech on our environment then read this great report and interactive visualisation. The report abstract says it all about this merger of art and science to tell a story.

Carbolytics shows the loading of cookies in real time.

If you want to know more about the impact of website cookies for advertising on our environment then load the project’s interactive visualisation and watch/

“Carbolytics is a project at the intersection of art and research by artist Joana Moll in collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The project aims to raise awareness and call for action on the environmental impact of pervasive surveillance within the advertising technology ecosystem (AdTech), as well as to provide a new perspective to address the social and environmental costs of opaque data collection practices. (source).”

UX designers have a responsibility to design for sustainability. That’s global empathy. Here’s an example of a photo management app idea in progress.

There is now a movement of designers and guidelines to try and make digital life more sustainable. Check out this: Digital = physical: A guide to sustainable digital design from Microsoft XC Research.

Carbolytics report: https://carbolytics.org/report.html

Ultan Ó Broin (@ultan) is a user experience design professional, educator, and learner. Sustainability and ethics in design be the thing.