Online shaming
Picky Nicky champions the design duo addressing internet pollution
Most of us will have heard about giant data centres, where Internet Protocol (IP) traffic – colloquially referred to as data – flows every time we use the internet, email or apps on smartphones and other connected devices. Out of sight, these servers are powered up and running all day, every day, requiring vast quantities of energy to run and cool. Data flow currently accounts for one per cent of global carbon emissions, having grown 12-fold since 2010 and overtaken the aviation industry.
We have become accustomed to using more and more data, a seemingly inexhaustible resource that is out of sight, out of mind. As well as the gigabytes gobbled up by my website, email and mobile usage, and the 1TB of physical storage on my devices, there’s also 200GB of icloud storage, presumably scattered across many distant data centres. My screen time is six plus hours per day on a computer, the smartphone is on top, and then there is the Wifi-enabled Loewe
TV, Sonos, Nest and more. We are inured to this vast network of storage, yet there’s barely any connection between data and energy use.
Frequent flyers are shamed into flying less, many have reduced their meat consumption to help combat carbon emissions, yet governments push to increase connectivity and offer faster broadband to more of their populations. I have never heard of any incentives, programmes or campaigns to reduce browsing, downloading, messaging or viewing online – until I received an email from Formafantasma.
The Milan-based designers recently redesigned their website specifically to minimise energy consumption and the carbon emissions that result from browsing. The pair first became interested in the subject while investigating recycling of electronic waste for their ‘Ore Streams’ exhibition in 2017. Every Formafantasma project begins with meticulous research, in this case it meant a 20-page brief and a strategy session with graphic designers Studio Blanco, who collaborated on the design. Most visitors land on a website’s home page, but it’s rarely their final destination, so they kept the home page as light as possible. The logo is text in unicode rather than an image, while classic typefaces Arial and Times New Roman are used to reduce HTTP requests. The layout is straightforward to avoid loading unnecessary content, and rather than an infinite scroll where new images constantly load, photos can be previewed in a lower file weight, then downloaded on demand. Offering dark mode reduces screen brightness and therefore energy, especially on mobiles, which commonly use OLED screens. The site is powered by a tailor-made platform, with a significantly lower resource consumption server-side, and it’s hosted on Greengeeks, a green web-hosting provider. It’s about time that more companies were doing all this as standard.