Scottish Enterprise Design blog
Transforming public services to businesses in Scotland
I had an interesting conversation today with a couple of colleagues from VisitScotland. They had come across our web estate carbon calculator, and were interested in replicating our approach.
I had already indicated in the response to the invitation that I had reservations about how useful this approach is. So it was an interesting chat.
Continue reading “On calculating carbon”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.
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.
Continue reading “How are businesses thinking about business purpose in a changing world?”
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.
Continue reading “Measuring our carbon output”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.’
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.
Continue reading “Let’s green our web : part 2”There is a campaign on Twitter this week (15th-19th February) #LetsGreenTheWeb to support and raise awareness of ClimateAction.tech. This prompted a discussion from a few of us here at Scottish Enterprise to look more closely at how we can reduce carbon emissions associated with our websites.
Continue reading “Let’s green the web”