Nerding out for future

As an ethically and socially minded research, design and strategy studio, what impact our work has and how and at what “cost” we achieve it is equally important to us.

Do our solutions solve real problems? Are they accessible to and valuable for as many different groups as possible? Do they help to promote an open, democratic society? Do they only use as many resources and energy as are necessary?

So far, so straightforward. But what is up with the “nerd” stuff in the title?

Quite simply, a significant proportion of our projects take place in the digital space – in other words, we design products and services for the web. Sadly, we have been observing multiple unpleasant trends and problems here for a long time. The two main issues are:

• The ecological implications of an ever-growing (and very resource-hungry) digital infrastructure
• The social impact of web platforms and how they amass and use user data

We’ll talk about both in more depth very soon.

Taking things into our own (tiny) hands

As a purpose-driven design studio, we naturally want to do things better. We want to contribute to a healthy web that serves humanity and doesn’t kill the planet.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t always worked out as well as it should have. For example, putting our own website to the website carbon test delivered rather humbling results. We have quite a bit of catching up to do.

This is why we started this blog: to learn and show how building web experiences can be done “better” in a public self-experiment.

To be clear, these are very humble beginnings of a potentially long journey, especially since it’s been about a decade since the author of these lines last worked with code in any “professional” capacity.

But the plan is to iteratively build whatever “this thing” is now into a proper website where we can

• share interesting articles and resources around issues, trends and best practices across the fields of sustainable web design, accessibility and the open web in general
• directly put them into action by implementing them on this very website – and sharing how we did it (or failed)

If that sounds interesting and like the right level of “nerdy” to you, I’d very much invite you to join this journey and subscribe with RSS or follow our social accounts to get notified when a new article pops up.

Let’s learn and grow together to create a better, more responsible web in the future!