Growing Together with Sustainable Digital Design in 2023

Every year, we sit down with ourselves to create resolutions to improve our lives as individuals. In business, we put down our targets and goals to achieve success and grow stronger. For SDD, the goals and aspirations are greater than the ones we could list down. It comes together with collaboration and support we gain throughout the way from proactive and positive-thinking creatives joining the movement. 

More than ever, we insist on consistency as a core value to grow Sustainable Digital Design (SDD). We aim to continue building SDD as a platform where the creative community could learn from different people about sustainability. Moreover, we will continue making diverse forms of content that inform our day-to-day practices, in strategy, design, development and various areas of digital production. We aim to connect with more creatives and hear about their experiences in adopting and adapting to sustainable practices in their work and experimenting with new ways of approaching creative practices.

The State of Sustainable Digital Design report is our first in-depth dive into industry trends and best practices in this area. For the upcoming year, we aim to expand our perspective on digital sustainability and produce more critical and industry-focused reports, highlighting how far we have come and our future prospects. 

Blackrocks Larry Fink predicted in this year’s letter that “the next 1,000 unicorns won’t be search engines or social media companies, they will rather be sustainable, scalable innovators – startups that help the world decarbonise and make the energy transition affordable for all consumers”. The macroeconomic perspective of climate investing is massive. The outlook of the future shows us that we need to step up and learn how to conduct business while keeping the environment in mind.

Evidently, the urgent threat of climate change requires a significant ramp-up of how we use digital in a more sustainable way.  Many design and digital studios are making efforts towards coming closer to becoming climate positive, yet there are a lot of feasible improvements we can make. For this year, we aim to reduce the studio's carbon emissions and issue a transparency report that showcases our progress. This will be incorporated into our website, where we will share the calculations of our emissions, the offset efforts, and the support we offer to our clients to push towards more sustainable strategies and conscious design.

We believe in taking initiative, Sustainable Digital Design has the potential to not only benefit the environment but also to drive business success. As people, consumers, and clients become more environmentally conscious, they are increasingly likely to favour companies that prioritise sustainability in their operations. The shift into sustainable design practices can help us save costs by using more energy-efficient technologies, reducing waste, and making sustainability the norm of the creative industry. Our community of creatives from different expertise have repeatedly demonstrated that the journey towards sustainability is rewarding. While there are still challenges to overcome, the future must be sustainable digital design and we are hoping to see significant shifts, new trends, and groundbreaking technologies towards eco-friendly practices in the coming year.