Abstract

As the demand for digital products continues to grow, prevailing design methods that largely ignore ecological or societal well-being have become an urgent problem over the last two decades. These methods of creating have led to digital products that exploit human vulnerabilities, weaken our collective view of reality and decouple the digital from the physical. This reality, blended with the energy-intensive infrastructure underpinning the internet, has resulted in an ecological footprint of the internet that rivals some of the world's highest-polluting countries. Looking at prominent design practices through the lens of their societal and ecological impacts over the last twenty years, we can see how current design processes serve to “defuture” us by damaging our planet and societal wellbeing.

Perpetuating this issue, is the fact that there are few resources for designers to aid them in alternative ways of creation. This dearth of resources that could help designers understand how to create sustainable digital products, led to the investigation of pattern libraries and ultimately the research question of “how might design patterns, in the form of a pattern library, persuade designers to shift to more sustainable UX practices?”

To develop the pattern library, a collection of research was consulted, to translate the theoretical knowledge into a set of interface patterns that can lead to more sustainable outcomes when implemented. The goal of this pattern library was to develop a tangible resource that can practically assist designers in adopting more sustainable methods of creation. This library was then tested to understand how well it achieves these goals and where the areas for improvement exist to ultimately create a tool that designers across all industries can turn to. These patterns demand that the powerful technologies that we use daily are designed for humans – and the planet we depend upon.