Digital Sustainability: The how and why it is important
I recently discovered how digital product can be more sustainable. In this article, it details how UX designers apply sustainable practiced to their work.
Sustainable product design involves creating products with a lower environmental impact. This includes digital products. Digital sustainability applies social, economic, and environmental principles to digital products delivered through the internet (Vinney, 2025).
While digital products are not always physical, they still consume resources, including energy to maintain servers and operate user devices, and electronic waste produced by older devices.
According to the Sustainable Web Manifesto, “If the Internet was a country, it would be the fourth largest polluter.” As a result, digital sustainability can help decrease technology’s negative impact on the environment.
designing products that reduce energy and material consumption.
The circular economy model is a sustainable business model where products are designed for their ability to be reused, recycled, and repaired. As a result, products are designed to maximize their resources.
One great way to do it is to reduce the computer resources required through things like sustainable software coding and green data centers.
Creating user interfaces and digital hardware that is easy to update encourages people to keep their products longer, lengthening the product’s lifecycle. This can be done by using recyclable materials in hardware design, creating products that are durable and long-lasting, and making sure products can be easily disassembled for repairs or upgrades.
Digital sustainability follow many of the same principals that offers actionable strategies, like energy-efficient coding, extending device lifecycles, and optimizing for lower specs, that provides the guides for designers to put into practice. The article also does not shy away from challenges such as higher costs, user resistance to change, performance trade-offs, privacy vs efficiency, and ethical AI concerns. And while the articles doesn't state what we can do to address these problems, it challenges the designers who read the article to be mindful as we create.
For my capstone I have been playing with the idea of having my end product be a digital design. And if I go down this route I will need to keep in mind the issues that the article states as well as try to implement their solutions.
References
Vinney. C, (March 31, 2025). A guide to sustainable product design in the digital world. UX Design Institute. https://www.uxdesigninstitute.com/blog/sustainable-product-design/
