There are 142 apps on my iPhone. Only 8 to 10 apps are actively used in my daily life. Most apps are dormant in some corner. I have free dictionary app that I love and use all the time, while in the same folder, the $29.99 Collins English Dictionary was only used once or twice. There are 4 screens of camera and photo processing apps on one of my friend’s iPhone. I wonder how many photo processing apps does she use after taking a photo. All of them? I seriously doubt.
This question hit me when I was jogging the other day: If sustainability is a big issue in the physical world, is it also applicable to the digital world? I decided to give it a try and see where this thought will lead me.
From the creator’s perspective, producing in the digital world and get it to the market is not a thing compared with its equivalent in the physical world. If one has an idea, she can hire a programmer or if herself can do the job to implement the idea and put it up on the web and charge for it. Due to cost of producing is decreased, people are more inclined and encouraged to produce more. This is not necessarily a bad thing, unless not enough thoughts are put into the product before it being exposed to the market. So there are always NEW products coming out, more than enough for people to consume. Just take a look at the introduction page for the apps in iPhone’s App Store: “The Best!” “#1!” “The First!” “The Most Satisfying. Ever!” etc. The creators are obsessed with creating NEWs, sometimes they don’t even bother to do some research on the existing ones. They don’t think through what make their products really stand out. They don’t have the big ecosystem in mind when they produce, just because they don’t see the pollution they produce in the digital world. More responsibility and pressure are needed for the creators before they put something in the digital world. They are producing, so there are people consuming, which all take time and effort. So the product must better be damn good or at least no harm.
From the consumer’s perspective, the procedure or process of buying cannot be easier nowadays. One just needs to register once and then she only needs to click one button. In another word, the product is one click away. But there are always more products than what one actually needs. So people always buy far more than they actually need. The “free” tag tied to the products in the digital world makes this behavior even more frequent. If you are an iPhone user, think about how many free apps you downloaded from the App Store, but only opened once or twice, or even worse, never opened? Smaller size and non-tangibility of the digital products, more storage space on the digital devices, lower price of the product and more enticing advertising lines, all of which add together to make the consumer more attemptted to buy more than they ever need or be able to consume. The consequences may not be as visible as in the physical world in terms of taking up more space or even financially speaking. However, the decisions consumers have to make never become less. It may not cost a thing for a consumer from downloading a piece to deleting it. But the time and effort the consumers put into, bigger or smaller, all count.
From the artifact’s perspective, you might blame yourself if you have four cars in your garage, consumed all by yourself, while you feel no shame at all if you have installed eight different web browsers on your computer and have three of them opened at once for different tasks. What have changed when the product moved from the physical realm to the digital one? Does an iPhone application have a life cycle? Can it be recycled, or reused? What does it mean to the consumers if one application takes 1M storage space? Is there an equivalent in the physical realm for application or software update? What does it mean to delete an application on your iPhone? Any pollution produced at all? In what form? Do whom harm? Any effect on the consumers themselves? You can returning a physical product and get a refund in most cases, but why not digital ones? Since products in the digital realm have no weight, no texture, and no aging, then what makes them unique, memorable and special to us? Are the apps charging your credit card on your iPhone necessarily better than the free versions? If we bought one digital product but later don’t feel it’s useful anymore, can we sell it to others? Etc.
These are some of the thoughts and questions that make me think when it comes to sustainability in the digital realm. They are by no means mature thoughts, but enough to keep me thinking as a designer when I set out for a design project. It’s a nice thing to keep in mind and make a positive change to the ecosystem in our digital world.
