Image: NASA
The Government Design Principles have been guiding the design for government services since their creation in 2012. They’re pithy, easy to remember, and can be easily applied.
We’re adding a new design principle for sustainability. This will help teams take responsibility and ownership for the sustainability of services. It also starts to tie together existing work that is taking place to make information technology and services greener within government.
The new principle is:
11. Minimise environmental impact
We need a large amount of energy, water and materials from the real world to build and run digital services.
Even a small improvement to a service will help reduce its environmental impact, including climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.
Follow sustainability best practice to reduce the environmental impact of your service across its lifespan. What we do today has a lasting impact on our planet.
How we created the principle
This work grew out of a small community group looking at design and sustainability at the Government Digital Service (GDS). We knew we needed to look more broadly outside our department, so we set up a working group. We recruited people from across the government, from different disciplines, departments and organisations. We facilitated 2 workshops: the first around design principles: how they’re used in general, and how a design principle around sustainability might be used. We used this list of ingredients to draft the principle, which we then took into a second workshop for critiquing, editing and rewriting.
This principle provides a starting point for practitioners from all user centred design (UCD) roles to ensure that their services take short and long term environmental impacts into consideration. The principle encourages small, achievable action on what can be considered an overwhelming and intimidating topic. It reminds practitioners of the power and influence they hold by designing services.
The first and most important aspect of this principle is to remind practitioners that digital services are made up of tangible materials and require energy and resources to run. We have found that many people consider the internet, the cloud and digital environments to be 'ephemeral' and often do not take their materiality into account. There can be an assumption that ‘digital is free’. By putting this materiality front and centre, we are prompting practitioners to reframe their thinking and take the same approach that they would to more real-world services.
This builds on other work around sustainability that's happening in GDS, including measuring the climate impact of our digital services at GDS and developing a set of principles for the design and delivery of greener services.
The bigger picture of sustainability in government
Aside from adding a new principle, many more things are going on to make government services more sustainable. Defra has created a set of principles for greener services, the NHS created their own design principle for sustainability, GOV.UK One Login is focusing on delivering a green service by measuring their impact. We also have new guidance in the Service Manual on Environmentally sustainable services.
How you can get involved
Take part in the UK Government Digital Slack #planet-centred-design community group.
5 comments
Comment by Martin Jordan posted on
So important! Thank you for doing this work and sharing it widely.
What does the poster for principle 11 look like? I have not found it on GitHub yet.
In that context, here is also a write-up worth dusting off is this: https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2021/11/08/how-designers-in-the-uk-government-help-address-climate-change/
Comment by Ben Carpenter posted on
Hi Martin. Yes, we're now looking for someone to create an 11th poster, and to update the other 10.
Thank you for reminding of that blog post, too.
Comment by James Arthur Cattell posted on
Most of me absolutely loves that "Minimise environmental impact" has been added as the 11th Government Design Principle 🙂
(part of me loathes that I still can't remember them all).
Comment by Kazuhito Kidachi posted on
Thank you for the good news, for the wonderful decision. I'm curious how you will make the use of W3C's Web Sustainability Guidelines, which is now under development, in future. Also, I love the picture you put on this article ... I'm sure that the photo was taken by Apollo 8 crew.
Comment by Frank posted on
I imagine AI will have a huge impact on this principle and I wonder how we'll consider and be able to measure the energy use of AI in future?