When COVID-19 hit, many governments reverted to a panic publishing approach, getting as much content up on their websites as quickly as possible. Structure, organization, testing, it all got shoved aside in the rush to publish. Sarah explains how this sort of panic publishing culture can be avoided in the future because panicking serves nobody.

Sarah Richards defined the term ‘content design’ in the early days of GOV.UK, where she led the award-winning content team in the design of the UK government website. For me, GOV.UK is one of the shining lights when it comes to true and genuine quality web design and management. GOV.UK has shown what online government for the people, rather than for the politicians, can be like, by being functional, evidence-based, rigorously tested, clear and succinct. Sarah now runs Content Design London, a content design consultancy. Sarah is a wonderful person and a true digital pioneer.

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When Liam Nugent closed down his digital agency he accounted for all the digital stuff they had created. Each employee was generating about 100 gigabytes of data a year. When they cleaned up all this data so as to give a quality hand-off to their clients, they found that 99.9% of the 8 terabytes of data they had created was useless.

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Netlife is one of Norway’s digital pioneers, having focused on usability and user experience when it was not exactly fashionable. Beth Stensen, their CEO, talks to Gerry McGovern about how Netlife is on a new journey which focuses on the Earth Experience. It’s exciting and challenging times. Digital can often accelerate very bad and wasteful human behaviours. Designing digital for Earth Experience is a key challenge and opportunity.  

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By 2035, it is estimated that there will be more than 2,000 zettabytes of data produced globally. Based on current storage pricing, 2,000 zettabytes would cost $58 trillion to store. The global economy is currently worth about $80 trillion. The pace and quantity of data production is not even remotely sustainable.

One zettabyte—just one zettabyte—would require 20 trillion trees worth of paper to print out. There are about three trillion trees left on this planet. The digital world is undergoing a Big Bang of data and 90% of it is useless because we have a culture that prizes production and collection over-analysis and insight. Nick talks about how we might address the Big Data tsunami. 

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The growth in webpage size over the years has been astounding. It is driven by a culture of delivery, a project mindset, and a feeling that the Web is this unlimited space where you can essentially do anything you want without consequences. But good web design is a complex task that many organizations are either unwilling or unable to manage professionally.

Once the initial buzz of signing off the visual design is done people want to move on. Fixing stuff is seen as a cost that the organization doesn’t have time or money for. Reframing things around quality can change the focus. Jono explores how we can think of web design through a quality lens.

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Climate change is not seen by most as an immediate crisis, so we don’t act with urgency. The digital world is fairly blind to what needs to be done because in digital design we don’t think deep, broad and wide enough. Jared challenges us to think longer and broader and deeper, to think more connectedly on an earth experience level. We must rise to this impending global threat because if we don’t we condemn future generations to sink in a world we—us, our generation—have wasted.

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Chris Coyier talks to Gerry McGovern about how many of the tools and resources out there make it easy for developers and designers to create bloated, heavy, energy-sapping digital designs. Chris says we need new thinking and new tools that clearly indicate when we are making design decisions that are bad for the user and bad for the planet.

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In this episode, Gerry McGovern speaks with Erika Hall from Mule Design. Gerry discusses with Erika if we've ruined web design, and if we have, what do we do about it?

Buy Gerry McGovern's new book 'World Wide Waste'

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Welcome to World Wide Waste, a podcast about how digital is killing the planet and what to do about it. What is quality when it comes to web design, web development, web management? How do we know the customer is having a quality experience? How do we know as a web professional that we are doing a quality job? These are questions Karen Peeters, General Manager, Omni-Channel Management at Toyota Europe has been asking. I must apologise that the quality of the recording of Karen's voice is very poor. We had technical difficulties. However, the quality of the information that Karen delivers is extremely high. In fact, it is some of the most important insights that I have heard in 25 years of working in web management.

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Welcome to World Wide Waste, a podcast about how digital is killing the planet, and what to do about it. Eric Meyer is a passionate advocate of designing for humanity, of leaving no one behind when you create your design, of thinking deeply about how things work for everyone - not simply how beautiful they look.

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Eric Meyer / https://meyerweb.com/

World Wide Waste book / https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/

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