I went to the Design for Planet Festival

The bits I enjoyed from the 2-day eco-extravaganza 🌍

Last week (well, this week, as I write these on Sundays) I attended The Design Council’s ‘Design For Planet Festival’, which, let’s be honest, is a jazzy name for ‘eco-conference.’ But there were loads of interesting speakers covering some really great topics - here are two of my favourite bits:

“Don’t build a sports car if a bike can get you there.”

I loved the talk from Nicolas Paries of Heylow, a sustainability driven digital studio. They presented their 10 principles for Low Carbon Web Design deck, which was insightful, engaging, and beautifully designed.

My favourite parts were:

• 🏋️ Set up a webpage weight budget.
  Generally I’ll aim for ‘as small as possible’, when it comes to the size of web pages, but setting a hard limit globally across a site is a step further. This approach would certainly distribute my time more evenly, as a bloated ‘About’ page undoes the savings of an optimised homepage.

• 🍕 Keep it like pizza.
  Everyone likes a margherita, even the marinara purists. But add more toppings, and you’re diving into anchovy territory. Yuck.
  In other words, simple design speaks volumes, and you don’t need to overcomplicate your message. Y’know, like using a pizza metaphor 😶

• 📊 Benchmark your work.
  I have shout-outed… shoot-ooted… out-shat(?) websitecarbon.com — a method of benchmarking the carbon emissions and performance of websites. But the Heylow talk suggested the fantastic Ecograder. It presents much more detail, organised into actionable steps to reduce the carbon impact of your website, even if you’re not especially code-savvy 👇

My personal site’s Impact Report — not bad for a no-code novice!

Heylow’s presentation seems to be part of their paid (but budget friendly) Low Carbon course. I covered the potential carbon impact of my personal site’s optimisations a few weeks ago, for those that are new here👇

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Lowering the carbon footprint of your digital design

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“Please don’t buy our phones.”

It’s not the marketing strategy you’d hear from Apple. This was the opening keynote from Fairphone, the Dutch smartphone company that specialises in modular, repairable phones with environmental and socially responsible manufacturing.

An explosion of ethical repairability — Fairphone 5

While I sense that it was a good opportunity for them to plug their recently released Fairphone 5 (Europe only), this was certainly balanced by their attitudes towards sales. “The most sustainable phone is the one you already have”, argues founder Bas van Abel, reminding the audience that Fairphone don’t really want to sell phones - they want to change consumer mindsets.

But if your phone truly has sent its last hedgehog emoji, Fairphone have a compelling offering. The fifth iteration of their repairable phone boasts software support until 2031. Break that price tag (£649/€699) down into equivalent annual payments, and it makes the ‘sustainability tax’ a little more manageable.

Conclusion

The Design for Planet Festival is free and rolls around every year. While many attendees are User Experience or Product professionals, the talks are suitable for anyone interested in discussions surrounding environmental and social business practices 🦔

Thanks for reading,
Tom 🐢

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