Category: Environment

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I cycled to work

A man on a bike, wearing jeans and a dark grey sweater. cycling over a bridge over a river. Trees along the riverbank are in full leaf, and the scene is sunny.
Me, on a bike, crossing a new bridge over the River Clyde in Glasgow

I did something amazing today.

I cycled to the office. And back home again.

I know, billions of people ride a bike every day. I used to, too.

But more than 25 years ago, I slipped a disc and was told to stop cycling, because of the load on my lower spine. Since then, I’ve been diagnosed with #ataxia, which affects my balance and co-ordination.

Those are both pretty indispensable when riding a bike.

So I thought my cycling days were pretty much over, much like my mountaineering, football and running days.

But I recently inherited an #ebike that’s been sitting in a shed or garage for several years.

So I thought, why not?

I’ve been building up to this trip. It’s about 3.5 miles/5km to the office from where I live. Not far – I used to regularly walk to and from it when the weather was clement, until I couldn’t.

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Show your stripes

A warming stripe chart for Scotland showing temperature change from 1885-2023 as a series of coloured vertical lines. On the left the stripes are mostly blue with the occasional white or peach. Moving to the right more and more reds appear, becoming increasingly intense at the extreme right edge.

Today is day.

I’ve updated the header on this site for one day to mark it.

The chart above shows how temperatures have varied from the average across the whole of Scotland from 1884-2023. It’s fairly apparent what’s happening.

You can create your own stripes for where you are thanks to the University of Reading.

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Reducing carbon emissions from our websites

Why we are measuring our digital carbon emissions

All online activity generates carbon emissions. Every image downloaded, every click, server call and visit to our site. These types of interactions generate Scope 3 emissions. Lowering these emissions helps Scottish Enterprise towards achieving our Net Zero targets. And, for our users, the user experience is improved, along with SEO, because pages load faster and they use less data interacting with our sites.

Screenshot showing a snapshot of the Beacon report.
Beacon calculation of the SDI home page
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How are businesses thinking about business purpose in a changing world?

I wanted to find out if, and to what extent, Scottish businesses are purpose led. As part of this process we wanted to explore businesses’ attitudes and actions towards Net Zero and Fair work initiatives.

As a user researcher working at Scottish Enterprise, I joined with my colleagues in strategy to explore this in more depth and to provide insight to help shape the organisation’s approach going forward.

Working with the strategy team was a really positive and enjoyable experience. We worked very closely together to clarify the objectives and desired outcomes of the project and the strategy team were involved at every stage.

Companies and consumers both have a part to play to create more sustainable economies which help people to flourish.

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Measuring our carbon output

Screenshot of our website carbon calculator

The carbon costs of “digital” are not well understood.

How many emails have you received with “Consider the environment before printing this email” in the signature?

How many have you received with “Consider the environment before hitting Reply All to 26 random people” and adding “Thanks”?

For many people, “virtual” means “not real”.

As in, almost literally, non-existent.

Terms like “cloud” don’t help.

The reality is, the internet is the biggest machine humanity has ever built. It circles the entire planet.

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Let’s green our web : part 2

Last week I read a Twitter thread from Gerry McGovern. He’s a bit of a guru in designing digital experiences and is also passionate about the impact that ‘digital’ is having on the environment.


‘Organisation with 100 million visits a year finds that 5% of its content is getting over 80% of visits. Over 100,000 pages have not been reviewed in 10 years.
We produce content. We do not manage it. 90% of content is crap. It was like this 25 years ago. It’s still the same.’

The tweet from Gerry McGovern says that content on websites is not actively managed and in many cases not reviewed for years

It made me think about the Scottish Enterprise website and whether we saw the same statistics. So, I asked our product owner David what our customers were looking at.

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