Re: "Green Mode" Design

HI Ismael!

Thanks for sharing this - I really enjoyed the post.

I’ll share a few links that might be of interest for further reading, based on the ideas I read about in the post.

Lucia Ye, and her project, OnlignOS

Lucia Ye did some suuuper cool work in this field for her masters thesis, at the Royal College of Art in the UK. 

She wrote a piece for Branch magazine a couple of years back that I think is relevant, and she links to her thesis where she expands on the ideas in more detail.

https://branch.climateaction.tech/issues/issue-1/design-for-carbon-aware-digital-experiences/ <https://branch.climateaction.tech/issues/issue-1/design-for-carbon-aware-digital-experiences/>

For greener websites, think GOLD

Where I work, the green web foundation, we’ve been talking drawing inspiration from how the accessibility movement were able to set norms about making digital services more inclusive, and apply the to the domain of sustainability with digital services too

This 30 minute talk with transcript might be worth a look - we took the ideas of POUR (perceivable, operable, understandble, robust), and tried coming up with another set of properties, GOLD standing for  Green, Open, Lean, Distributed. The talk and deck with a transcript is below:

https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/fosdem/ <https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/fosdem/>

Carbon aware websites, and carbon aware browsers.

Branch, the digital magazine has a design that changes in response to carbon intensity signals. We were thinking of graceful degradation principles here, as a way to highlight the materiality of the internet, but also foregrounding some of the ideas of graceful degradation you refer to as a way to keep designs inclusive.

https://branch.climateaction.tech/issues/issue-1/designing-branch-sustainable-interaction-design-principles/ <https://branch.climateaction.tech/issues/issue-1/designing-branch-sustainable-interaction-design-principles/>

The library we use is below, and installable from npm with few code examples:

https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/grid-intensity <https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/grid-intensity>

I’m hoping we can port across some of the work and ideas on a similar golang library, back to the js version in the coming months, and we’d love to work with others here.

https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/grid-intensity-go <https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/grid-intensity-go>

Also, inspired by Lucia’s work, we wanted to try building a ‘branch' extension into a browser as well, because we felt this was something that browser could do natively as part of the web platform.

It turns out with that Firefox at least, you can programatically change the browser theme, on a timer.

This means you can animate transitions in the chrome to have it provide ambient signals as you browse - like smoothly transitioning between colours in response to how green the grids is, and so on.

You an see an issue where we expand on this, and share some code samples for doing so below:

https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/web-extension/issues/34 <https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/web-extension/issues/34>

Eco modes for browsers

Finally, going back a key question in your post - I know that with Michelle Thorne at Mozilla ran a session at Mozfest in 2019, exploring a bunch of ideas in a browser context with her Eco mode session.

There’s a load of ideas in there that really resonate with your article too 👍🏽

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/firefox-eco-mode-brainstorming-how-can-the-internet-tackle-the-climate-emergency/46582 <https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/firefox-eco-mode-brainstorming-how-can-the-internet-tackle-the-climate-emergency/46582>

Hope that is interesting for others, and apologies in advance for the link dump 😅

Chris Adams

Executive Director

w: thegreenwebfoundation.org
e: chris@thegreenwebfoundation.org
t: @mrchrisadams

German Office
Naunynstrasse 40
10999 Berlin
Germany

See our contact page for more details <https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/contact/>

> On 16. Jul 2022, at 13:33, Ismael Velasco <ismaelv.dev@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello all. 
> 
> At Chris Adams' urging I am posting here seeking your feedback on a blog post proposing the adoption of what I'm calling "green mode design", integrating the design principles of "graceful degradation" and "user control and freedom" for emissions reduction, climate justice and extended hardware obsolescence with all the downstream benefits in terms of mineral extraction, waste and lifecycle emissions. 
> 
> https://ismaelvelasco.dev/green-mode-design-through-graceful-degradation <https://ismaelvelasco.dev/green-mode-design-through-graceful-degradation>
> 
> If you know of any examples, please let me know. I will be building an open source POC browser extension in the coming weeks.