Re: "Green Mode" Design

Chris, this is incredibly helpful. You are a walking cornucopia, and I
hugely appreciate the link dump.

I love the idea of colour signals and other feedback designs. One question
I have is whether such constant monitoring and adjusting would itself be
carbon intensive to implement?

My absolute preference would be to have indicators that feed back live, as
well as cumulatively, and can auto-adjust settings (smart green mode), but
I worry it would add emissions along with valuable information, compared
with getting the same metrics on command, rather than continuously. On
command however would be a less effective behavioural nudge.

On Sat, 16 Jul 2022, 16:08 Chris Adams, <chris@thegreenwebfoundation.org>
wrote:

> 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/
>
> *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/
>
> *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/
>
> The library we use is below, and installable from npm with few code
> examples:
>
> 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
>
> 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
>
> *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
>
> 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
>
> If you know of any examples, please let me know. I will be building an
> open source POC browser extension in the coming weeks.
>
>
>