A requirement to “minimise environmental impact” has been added to the framework of principles intended to inform government’s design of public services.
The set of 10 principles first created by the Government Digital Service in 2012 has been added to for the first time in 13 years, with a new instruction intended to “remind practitioners that digital services are made up of tangible materials and require energy and resources to run”.
The 11th principle added to the Government Design Principles is headed “minimise environmental impact”.
“We need a large amount of energy, water and materials from the real world to build and run digital services,” the guidelines add. “Even a small improvement to a service will help reduce its environmental impact, including climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. Follow sustainability best practice to reduce the environmental impact of your service across its lifespan. What we do today has a lasting impact on our planet.”
The principles framework goes on to provide links to two blogs from digital professionals at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, including insights on the most recent government sustainability report, as well as details of how the department has created its own environmental design principles via a “planet-centred design working group”.
In a blog post explaining the addition of a new principle to the government-wide guidance for the first time since its creation, GDS indicates that “this work grew out of a small community group looking at design and sustainability” in the digital unit.
Having decided that “we needed to look more broadly outside our department… we set up a working group [with] people from across the government, from different disciplines, departments and organisations”.
This group examined how the existing principles are used by government, and how a new consideration of sustainability could be incorporated. Having decided to add a new and distinct principle, this was then drafted and edited with the group – before being formally added to the list this week.
The blog post – authorship of which is attributed to two GDS senior designers and another from NHS England – explains: “This principle provides a starting point for practitioners from all user centred design roles to ensure that their services take short- and long-term environmental impacts into consideration. The principle encourages small, achievable action on what can be considered an overwhelming and intimidating topic. It reminds practitioners of the power and influence they hold by designing services.”
It adds: “The first and most important aspect of this principle is to remind practitioners that digital services are made up of tangible materials and require energy and resources to run. We have found that many people consider the internet, the cloud and digital environments to be ‘ephemeral’ and often do not take their materiality into account. There can be an assumption that ‘digital is free’. By putting this materiality front and centre, we are prompting practitioners to reframe their thinking and take the same approach that they would to more real-world services.”
The new principle joins the existing list of 10 that were first introduced in 2013 and have been in effect since then:
- Start with user needs
- Do less
- Design with data
- Do the hard work to make it simple
- Iterate. Then iterate again
- This is for everyone
- Understand context
- Build digital services, not websites
- Be consistent, not uniform
- Make things open: it makes things better
The GDS blog post says that the new principle is one of many “things [that] are going on to make government services more sustainable” – including the Defra design guidelines, as well as advice on delivering sustainable services contained in government’s Service Manual.
Civil servants interested in finding out more or supporting GDS’s work are encouraged to join the #planet-centred-design group set up on the UK Government Digital Slack channel.