Inspiration can come from unexpected sources.

Take this article for example. It’s about websites but it was inspired by camping mattress repairs. The LLM in my head had some strange training materials. Bear with me though, it will all make sense. 

The mattress repair conundrum

If you’ve been camping this summer, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ve woken up with a painful achy sensation due to a deflated mattress, better known as “Overnight matt deflation syndrome” or OMDS. You’re not alone. Punctured mattresses present a huge issue for companies like Decathlon as well as their users. They offer repair services and fixing leaky air mattresses is apparently one of their most popular requests. The fix is simple – find the hole and apply a patch. Finding the hole can be tricky and time consuming though. The time factor is the issue here because it makes repairing the mattress uneconomical. 

So given the scale of issue, they broke down the problem to its definitive part – identifying where the leak was. They approached the challenge laterally and thought about what other industries might have experienced this sort of problem and had already solved it. This led them to an unlikely place. The fossil gas industry. 

Gas leaks are a huge problem for the fossil fuel industry. They can be costly and hard to find, just like they are for, err, camping mattresses. So they developed a solution. Using a special camera and microphone, they check pipelines for leaks. The microphone identifies the sound of leaks (pfft) and pinpoints it on the camera screen. Engineers can then tag the pipeline and make a repair. 

Decathlon found that this technology can be used for their repairs too. It slashed the time required to patch a leak to a handful of minutes and made the repair offering viable again. When it’s fully rolled out it has the potential to massively reduce waste and increase customer satisfaction. 

Camping mattresses are like websites

The genius of this idea from Decathlon is not the use of technology to solve a problem, it’s in identifying the core of the problem you’re trying to solve. If you focus too hard on the overall problem you can end up missing potential solutions from other, unexpected places. If you remove the product, client, sector or industry from the equation and just try to solve the core user/customer problem, inspiration can come from anywhere. 

This is something Wholegrain practices across our projects and clients. Our user centric, Humane Web approach helps us focus on the need, not the problem at hand. We’re sector agnostic, which is a fancy way of saying that if a solution from one sector can work for another, we’ll use it. A simple example might be using e-commerce inspired product filters to make it easier to find articles on a large media site. 

What do heart surgeons and transport planners have in common?

We’re not just looking for features though, it’s about the shared needs of projects too. Two of our most recent site builds, EACTs and UITP are great examples. On the face of it, a site for Cardiothoracic surgeons should have little in common with one for Public Transport professionals. But when you look at the needs of the two sets of users, you find much more common ground.

Both sites are for Membership organisations, so they need to provide relevant information about things like events, industry news and best practices. We can take tried and tested ways of sharing news for heart surgeons and apply them for transport planners. The lessons from a transport summit site can improve the user experience for medical professional conference sites. 

Different missions, shared goals 

This user centric approach helps us share solutions and experience for clients who have similar goals but are at different stages in their journeys too. Environment Bank and Good Energy are two of our clients with sustainability at the core of their operations. They’re both on a mission to make the UK greener, cleaner and more bio diverse but work in very different sectors. Despite this, some of their core user problems are very similar and solutions can be shared between the sites. 

Part of their challenge is helping UK businesses to transition to working in ways that decarbonise and restore natural habitats, to improve the local and national environment. Environment Bank does this by helping developers meet their legal bio-diversity commitments through consultation and habitat banks. Good Energy is helping decarbonise the energy sector through renewable energy provision and support for lower carbon technologies like EVs and heat pumps. 

A big challenge for both companies comes down to education, information and persuasion. The design techniques, user experiences and features that Good Energy have been using can help to inform what users need for an organisation like Environment Bank, just like with EACTs and UITP. Users are looking for solutions to environmental problems and want clear, easy to digest information to help them make positive changes. 

For an organisation like Environment Bank their offering is less well known than the renewables that Good Energy offers. But Good Energy has also been in the position of offering different ways of doing things that required reassurance and confidence to persuade users. We can apply the lessons from more mature organisations to organisations who are earlier in their development. No matter what stage they are at, these users for these organisations’ sites have similar needs. Focussing on the needs means more solutions.

Focussing on users is our super strength 

When you look at our portfolio of sites and clients, you’ll see a diverse set of organisations, sectors and industries. The thing they share is that they want to work with a sustainably minded agency to further their positive goals. This diversity means that we’ve got a huge breadth of experience meeting a wide range of user requirements. Our sites are robust, humane, digitally sustainable, performant, but most importantly user-centric. After all it’s their problems we need a site to solve, no matter what they are. 

If you’ve got a web project you’d like to discuss, reach out to Bailey to find out how this approach could work for you. 

You’ll find more insights into our working practices in this range of articles on our Humane Web approach.

Today’s post is a collaboration between myself, Tom Greenwood, and Michael Andersen, a fellow digital sustainability advocate and author of the book Sustainable Web Design in 20 Lessons.

Michael got in touch with me recently with a rather interesting question — if people are increasingly getting their information directly from AI services like ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, should we still be designing websites for humans? Put another way, is the primary audience for a website in the future going to be non-human intelligence?

This is a rather provocative question, and as Michael and I both care deeply about the environmental and social impact of the web, it is one that we should not ignore.

Of course, the idea that we might have to consider robots when designing a website is not entirely new. There has long been a tension between the need (and desire) to provide the best experience to human users while also needing to optimise websites for higher search rankings. The robots have been exerting power over us for a long time already. However, until recently the robots were simply the gatekeepers controlling who actually finds their way into our websites. With the rise of AI services, the robots are stealing our content and locking the gates behind them. 

This poses some interesting challenges for any person or organisation that has a website, and in the process forces us to ask some deeper questions about what we actually want the Internet to be moving forward. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that this is an inherently bad thing, and it’s certainly not all good, but Michael and I want to hold space to consider the challenges alongside the possibilities with open minds, to imagine how we might evolve the web positively for this new era.

The AI traffic paradox

In recent times we’ve seen a number of clients at Wholegrain Digital experience significant spikes in their web hosting traffic as a result of AI bots constantly crawling their pages for information. This can come at a real financial cost to the client, not to mention the environmental impact, and it raises the question over whether we should block AI bots from our websites.

At the same time though, Michael highlights that some organisations have seen significant drops in web traffic coinciding with the rising popularity of AI services such as ChatGPT. At Wholegrain we have seen ChatGPT appear as a new traffic source for some websites, but at this stage it’s mostly a small one, as fewer people tend to click back to websites from their AI answers compared to traditional search engine results. Not to mention the fact that Google now provides AI answers at the top of its search results these days, reducing the need for the website “visitor” to um… visit. 

So we have AI companies causing a significant increase in artificial traffic to websites, while also reducing the human traffic to those same websites. And yet the place where these AI tools get their information from are these very same websites. Websites that people have invested a lot of time and money into designing, building, and maintaining, as well as creating content for.

This article isn’t about arguing the injustice of this situation, but to sit with it and acknowledge that we are in something of a paradox. AI services need a thriving Internet full of rich information in order to do what they do, yet they simultaneously erode the incentive for people and organisations to invest in creating a thriving web. The snake is eating its own tail.

Visiting the source

In our discussions, Michael highlighted a key feature of this changing dynamic being that websites are increasingly treated as sources of information, rather than destinations to visit. If AI companies have their way, much like social media, people will spend most of their time on these new platforms and not leave. In this sense they really don’t care about your website other than it being a source of data to mine. 

But it’s likely that if you have a website, then you do care that people visit. You likely have reasons, whether commercial or not, to want real human beings to visit your website. You could, as some are doing, block AI crawlers from your website to discourage them from mining your website and attempt to ensure that the information on your website is really only available by visiting your website. This may work for some, but as people increasingly use AI tools as search engines, blocking AI crawlers entirely is not dissimilar to blocking Google from your website. It’s a bold and admirable ethical stance, but it might not be very practical in many cases. So what can we do instead?

My personal view is that we may need to design hybrid websites, facing the tension head on by separating the needs of humans from the “needs” of robots, but neglecting neither. We can compartmentalise, at least partially, the destination for humans, and the source of data for machines. In doing so, we might actually create a win-win and unleash a new wave of human creativity in web design, reversing the long term trend of websites “all looking the same.” Let me explain.

The human experience

One of the things that this new dynamic highlights is that some people go online in search of answers to questions, and LLMs are increasingly taking this role. However, the user experience of LLMs tends to come in the form of long text based responses, or a digital voice speaking these same answers. What they don’t provide is the rich, immersive experience that has for a long time been a significant part of what people enjoy about going online. It could be argued that in the past decade or so, as User Experience “best practices” have become more firmly established and websites have been optimised for search rankings, the web has become increasingly bland compared to its earlier days when website design was a truly creative practice.

We now have an opportunity to reverse that trend by prioritising the human visitor not just in terms of ease of use, but in terms of the richness of experience that we offer people. Websites that are truly beautiful, immersive, joyful and thought provoking in their design, and which people want to visit because they are places that people actually want to be rather than just sources of dry information.

This also includes the tone of voice of the content, which is generally very bland in LLM tools but can be much more expressive on your own website, especially if there is now less need to awkwardly jam our content full of SEO keywords. This will allow us to enrich people’s experiences and convey the spirit of our brands in ways that an LLM likely won’t, making our own websites a more authentic expression of what we really have to say.

We could compare this to the shift we are seeing in high streets, whereby generic, uninspiring shops have struggled to compete with online retailers, but it has left an unmet need for unique, enjoyable experiences that people cannot get from shopping on Amazon. When high street retailers shift their perspective to see themselves as destinations to be experienced rather than just places to buy things, people do make the effort to leave their homes and go into town. Similarly, when we view websites this way and design experiences that people genuinely enjoy visiting and even want to share with their friends, we create something that the LLMs cannot replicate, even if they steal some of our content.

Of course, my comparison with high streets runs out here as some of the organisations that have the greatest opportunity to do this are likely those with some element of e-commerce. There is an inherent opportunity to inspire potential customers with rich visual information about the products, and interactive tools to help them understand products better and choose what is right for them. Of course we want to do this in a way that is accessible and environmentally efficient, but there are huge opportunities here for creativity. To quote my colleague Chânelle Sharp, a designer at Wholegrain, “the design of websites will shift to work even harder for the user now”. I think that is a good thing, with web design in the near future becoming much more about digital storytelling.

People are time poor and so instead of wasting their time with large reams of text intended mostly for Google, user experiences could actually cut back significantly on written text in many cases and just give people exactly the information they need, in a beautiful and engaging format. And despite the downsides of these AI tools, it may just be that AI coding tools in the long term will make it easier for organisations to create rich functionality and design features such as visualisations, personalisations, dashboard, calculators, and interactive journeys, that were previously beyond their budgets. It may well be therefore that AI coding will gradually reduce one of the key limiting factors in doing really exciting things online.

Then come the robots

If we design websites primarily for humans once more and relegate the AI and search crawlers to second class citizens of the web, then you may be wondering, how do you get your website featured in search results and AI responses? I think the answer might be to have a secondary layer of a website that is purely informational, with large repositories of high quality written information and raw data relating to your organisation and area of expertise. These repositories can include high quality original data, white papers, academic research and the like, making them a rich source of quotable information for the LLMs. These pages can be crawled by crawlers without getting in the way of human visitors, and to quote Chânelle again, “if the information is purely informational, then maybe it doesn’t even need to be designed”. This second layer of a website could be super efficient by virtue of not being mixed in with the presentation elements such as imagery and custom fonts that are there only to improve the experience of humans.

But what if your visitors do want to access some of this information from your data repository while they are on your website? This is where a more efficient LLM tool tailored just to your website may provide the answer. Tools such as HOLP, which we used for the UK Green Building Council, can provide answers to the questions of the people who have arrived at your website, without them having to leave your website and unlike mass market AI tools, they can provide trusted answers as they are trained to provide information from your own websites information repository (as well as its user facing web content). This is a win for the human visitor who is seeking specific information that may not be easy to find in the standard user facing content, and for the organisation who is able to meet the unique needs of such visitors without complicating the user experience for other people.

I’ll hand over to Michael now to discuss how some of this might be achieved on a practical level.

Down at street level

I want to begin by saying how excited I have been to write this alongside Tom. Ever since I first read his book Sustainable Web Design, he has been a constant source of inspiration to me. The hybrid idea he lands on, a light and human surface sitting on top of a denser layer meant for machines, is the thread I want to follow, though I would not want to give either of us too much credit for it, since the web has been built in roughly this shape for a long time and most of us have simply taken it for granted. What feels worth examining now is not the layers themselves, but the question of who that hidden layer is increasingly being built for, and that is where my own corner of the work comes in.

That corner is the code itself, where I tend to sit rather than up above it looking at the strategy. Tom has been describing the shape of all this from above, the way you might look down at a city and see how the roads connect to one another, and I want to stay down at street level for the rest of this, because it is down there that the same question we kept circling stops being philosophical and turns into something you can put your hands on. It becomes a question about which file you create, and what you put in it, and who you imagine reading it. So where Tom has been holding the why of all this, I want to spend my half on the how, on what the hybrid he describes actually looks like when you are the one who has to build it.

The plumbing underneath the page

If you have ever sat and built a website properly, not just made it look nice but actually built it so that it holds together, then you already know that a page is never only the thing the visitor sees. Underneath the colours and the images and the words arranged on the screen, there is a second version of the same page that almost no human ever really looks at. There is structured data, little labelled notes in the markup that say this is the price, this is the author, this is the date, this is the review, and here is how many stars it got. There is JSON sitting in the background, describing the page in a way that is clean and predictable and easy for software to read. And none of this is particularly new to anyone who builds for the web, because we have been doing it for years, mostly so that search engines could understand our pages well enough to rank them, and most visitors have never had any idea it was there.

To make that a little less abstract, it helps to picture what one of those hidden notes actually looks like in practice. If I have written an article, I might tuck a small block of structured data into the page, written in a format called JSON-LD, which is really just a tidy way of listing plain facts so that a machine can read them without having to guess. In ordinary words, the block says something like, this thing is an article, its headline is this, the person who wrote it is this, it was published on this date, and it belongs to this larger publication. None of that changes a single pixel of what you see on the screen, and you could read the article perfectly well without ever knowing the block was there. But a machine that lands on the page no longer has to work out who the author is by hunting around the layout and hoping it has guessed correctly, because you have simply told it, in a vocabulary that thousands of other sites use in exactly the same way. That shared vocabulary is what people mean when they talk about schema, and the whole point of it is that meaning stops being something a machine has to reconstruct and becomes something you have stated plainly.

What is changing now is the kind of reader that layer is starting to serve. There is a proposed convention that appeared back in 2024, suggested by Jeremy Howard, who is one of the people behind Answer.AI, and it is called llms.txt. The idea is almost touchingly simple. You place a plain markdown file at the root of your website, the same way we have placed a robots.txt file there for decades, and in it you lay out, in clean and readable text, the parts of your site you actually want a language model to read. No clutter, no menus, no scripts, no advertising, just the meaning, served plainly.

And because it is only markdown, building one is genuinely something you could finish in an afternoon, which is part of why it interests me so much. You open a plain text file, you name it llms.txt, and you place it at the very root of your site so that it sits at a predictable address the way robots.txt always has. At the top you write the name of the site and a sentence or two describing what it is and who it is for. Then you write a short list of links to the pages that actually matter, your best writing, your core explanations, your reference material, and after each link you add a handful of words saying what a reader will find there. That is more or less the whole thing. If you want to go a step further there is a fuller version, often kept as a second file, where instead of only pointing at your important pages you include the full cleaned up text of them, so that a model has the real content in front of it rather than just a map showing where the content lives. Either way, what you are really doing is curating. You are deciding, on purpose and in advance, what you would want a machine to understand about your work if it only ever saw the tidy version and never visited the site at all.

I want to be honest about what it is and what it is not, because it would be easy to oversell it. It is not an official standard, and Howard himself has said as much. The big AI systems do not reliably read it yet, and by now more than one fairly large study has looked at the question and found that adding the file does not measurably change how often a model mentions you, with one analysis of around three hundred thousand sites finding essentially no difference at all. Google has even said, fairly plainly, that it has no plans to support it. And yet hundreds of thousands of sites have already added one, including a few names you would recognise, and people who have watched the web for a long time keep comparing it to the early days of schema markup, back when that too looked like a niche curiosity that later turned out to matter a great deal.

And this is where I want to put the practical heart of it, because it would be easy to read everything above and imagine that building Tom’s hybrid means building two entire websites, one warm and human and one stripped bare for the machines, two of everything and twice the work. You can do that, and for certain things you genuinely should, but for most of a site the truth turned out to be stranger and a good deal kinder than that. If you have already built the human layer properly, with markup that is clean and honest about what each thing is, with real headings and real buttons and images that are actually described, then you have already built most of the machine layer without ever thinking of it that way. What you add on top of that is thin. A little structured data to state plainly what the important things on the page are, and an llms.txt file at the root to hand a model the tidy version of what you most want it to read. That is the bulk of the work, and almost none of it is a second website. It is mostly just the first website.

Where the two layers do genuinely come apart is in the place Tom pointed to, the large stores of pure information, the white papers and the raw data and the long reference material that exist mainly to be read rather than to be experienced. For that kind of thing it really does make sense to build a separate and lighter layer, plain pages or plain markdown with almost no presentation wrapped around them, so that a crawler can read them cheaply and a person who actually wants the underlying detail can still reach it without having to wade through it on the main site. So when I try to picture the hybrid in concrete terms, it is not two parallel websites standing side by side at all. It is one human site built well enough that it serves the machines almost for free, sitting next to a small and efficient archive for the heavy reference material that nobody really wanted dressed up in the first place.

And this is the moment I really wanted to reach, because when you sit with all of this at once, you start to notice something a little strange, and a little hard to name. The future Tom was describing, the website that is one thing for people and another thing for machines, is in some sense already half built. We just never called it that. We built the human layer because we cared about people, and we built the machine layer because we wanted to be found, and now that machine layer is slowly turning into the thing that reads our work on the reader’s behalf. It is a bit like discovering that a path you have been clearing and maintaining for years leads somewhere you never expected it to go.

When accessibility starts serving the machine

There is one corner of all this that I have not been able to stop thinking about since my call with Tom, and it has to do with accessibility. For most of my career, the work of making a website accessible has been understood as work we do for people. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which most of us just call WCAG and which are looked after by the people at the W3C, exist so that someone who cannot see the screen, or cannot use a mouse, or who processes information differently, can still move through a website and understand it. In practice, when we talk about meeting those guidelines, we usually mean building to a level they call AA, which most teams treat as the realistic target, and the work of getting there is made up of a hundred small and very ordinary decisions. You write alternative text that genuinely describes what an image shows rather than leaving it empty. You use headings in a real order instead of choosing them for how big they happen to look on the screen.

You label the fields in a form so that it is clear what each one is asking for. You make sure every part of the page can be reached and operated with a keyboard alone, and that the text has enough contrast against its background to be read by someone whose eyes are tired or beginning to fail. None of it is glamorous, and almost none of it ever shows up in a screenshot, but it is the difference between a site a person can actually use and one that closes its door to them. Here in Europe that work has recently stopped being optional in a lot of cases, because the European Accessibility Act came into force in the summer of 2025 and now expects a great many digital products and services to meet exactly these guidelines. So accessibility has been on a lot of minds lately, and rightly so.

But here is the part that feels strange to me. The whole craft of accessibility has always been, underneath everything else, the craft of making meaning explicit. You write your markup so that a screen reader, which is itself a machine, can correctly understand what is a heading and what is a button and what an image is actually showing. You describe things in plain words so that software can relay them faithfully to a person who needs them in some other form. In other words, we have spent years and years learning to make our websites legible to a machine, because a machine was the thing standing between our content and the human who needed it. We just thought of that machine as an assistant working on behalf of a person, which it was.

And once you see it laid out like that, the overlap with everything I was describing earlier stops feeling like a coincidence and starts to look almost like the same task wearing two different faces. The alternative text you wrote for a blind visitor is meaning made explicit, and a language model wants that exact thing. The heading you marked up honestly so that a screen reader could announce it is structure made explicit, and a model trying to make sense of your page wants that too. The form field you labelled, the button you named properly, the landmark you added so that someone could skip straight to the main content, every one of those is intent stated plainly rather than left to be guessed, and plainly stated intent is precisely what this new reader is hungry for. Which means that in very practical terms, if you build a site to that AA level for the people who actually need it, you have quietly built a large part of your machine layer at the very same time, and the two reasons for doing the work, the human one and the technical one, turn out to be pointing in the same direction.

Now another kind of machine is arriving, the language model, and it turns out that much of the work we did to make the web kinder to people has also, almost by accident, made it more readable to this new reader. The structure, the explicit labels, the meaning made plain, all of the things we built for the person using assistive technology turn out to be more or less exactly the things a language model also wants. I find that both hopeful and slightly unsettling, and I do not think I am supposed to resolve which one it is. It is hopeful because it might mean that good, accessible, carefully made websites are simply ready for this new era without anyone having to compromise anything. And it is unsettling because there is something odd about realising that work you did for the most human of reasons also serves something that is not human at all.

And then it opens a question I genuinely do not know the answer to. If a language model can read the raw, structured meaning of a page and then reshape it into whatever form a particular person needs, spoken aloud, simplified, translated, slowed down, made calmer, then it is at least possible that AI becomes a better companion for people with accessibility needs than many of the tools we have today. The same shift could even help companies that have never been able to afford a genuinely good, accessible experience, because the model sitting in front of their content could, in principle, give their visitors a kinder journey than their own budget ever allowed. I want to hold that possibility gently rather than promise it, because we have all heard a great many promises about what AI is supposedly going to fix. But I would be lying if I said the thought did not move me a little, that the very thing reshaping the web might also, if we are careful and a bit lucky, make it gentler toward the people it has so often left behind.

AI as a search tool

I want to slow down here, because there is a worry underneath all of this that I have been turning over for a long while, and I am wary of how I say it, because it would be very easy to make it sound like I am complaining about the way people read now, and that is not what I mean at all.

At my job we have spent time talking with young people about how they find things out, and one of those conversations has stayed with me. A teenager said, more or less, that AI made the person lazy, that when something can simply be handed to the person, the person loses the urge to go and chase the answer. I want to be careful and call this what it honestly is, which is one young person being candid in one conversation, not a study and not a verdict. But it landed on something I had been feeling for a while without quite having the words for it. Because if the answer can be had instantly, without arriving anywhere at all, then a certain kind of journey simply stops happening. Not the journey through a checkout or a menu, but the one where you go looking for something, and you end up somewhere you did not plan to be, and you leave a little changed by having been there.

For a long time I think we treated that journey as part of the value of the web, even though we never wrote it down anywhere or put it in a proposal to a client. You arrived at a site, you read more than you came for, you understood the people behind it, you caught their tone of voice, you felt that there was a person or a team or a belief on the other side of the screen. That was never really about the information. The information was almost the excuse for the visit. And my worry is not that people have become lazy, but that we are building a version of the web where that kind of arrival is no longer necessary, at least for everything that can be reduced to a quick answer. I do not think that is the whole web, and I do not think it has to be a tragedy. But I think it is worth noticing what we might be letting go of while we are busy admiring everything we are gaining.

And I notice, sitting here at the practical end of all this, that my worry is really the shadow of Tom’s hope. He is hopeful that we will build places worth coming to, websites so rich and so genuinely worth the visit that people choose to arrive even when a machine could have spared them the trip. I share that hope, more than I probably let on. But the thing I keep turning over, down here where the pages actually get made, is whether the arriving itself is quietly being designed out of the web, and whether all the craft in the world can pull someone back to a place they no longer have any reason to go.

The questions I cannot put down

So I find myself ending more or less where Tom began, holding a handful of questions rather than answers, which I have come to think is the honest place to stand.

Are we still designing for people, or are we slowly becoming translators, standing in between humans and machines, trying to serve both at once without fully belonging to either? When a language model has already read everything on the page before the person ever arrives, what is the visit itself actually for, and what is left inside it that still matters? And if the model becomes the thing that shapes how our work is understood, I find myself wondering whether it might end up building better journeys through that work than we do, and whether, a little further down the same road, we will still need the style guides and the UX designers and the graphic content, or whether those become a luxury rather than a default.

I wonder too about the places that exist almost entirely to be read; the Wikipedias and the reference sites and the great open stores of knowledge, and whether they will one day be built in a wholly different way, written first as plain markdown for the machines rather than dressed up in markup for us.

I am not sure either, when it really comes to it, whether companies will simply hand the whole customer journey over to the AI sitting in front of their content, having decided that a more accessible and more helpful experience, delivered by a machine, is worth more to them than the elaborate one they once paid so much to design. And if plain text is becoming the shared layer that the machines hand out for free to anyone who asks, then what becomes the thing worth keeping precious, the thing we still make slowly and by hand precisely because it cannot simply be read out by something else and passed along? I do not have clean answers to any of these, and I am not sure I trust anyone who says they do.

What I do know is that the question Tom opened with, whether we are still designing for humans, is not really a question with a yes or a no waiting at the end of it. It is more like a question we are going to be living inside of for the next several years, whether we choose to or not.

This series has been giving a behind the scenes look at the Wholegrain team and how we operate. In our final article I’m talking to one of our Project Managers (PMs), Havana about our approach to client and working relationships. 

We start our conversation with Havana raving about a Demon Copperhead, a recent hit at her book club, “I absolutely loved it“. Her current read, The Sleepwalkers is less highbrow but more fun. I ask her if she’s spreadsheet tracking ratings and comments about the books they read in the club. There is one and she’s in charge of it. Project managers gonna project manage. 

As you might glean from this, Havana is a PM through and through. As her LinkedIn profile says, she’s adept at “Leading Cross-Functional Teams from Discovery to Launch”. She’s been working facilitating projects since she graduated. Initially she worked in the charitable housing sector and latterly for creative agencies. Havana talks fondly about her colleagues she’s worked with. It’s often the people she works with that give her the most inspiration. Theory, technique and frameworks are important but people, experience and collaboration trump that.

The people at Wholegrain are one of the things Havana talks most passionately about during our conversation. It’s the most tight knit and aligned company she’s ever worked for. We agree that Wholegrain’s innovative “blind” recruitment process must be working. 

The cohesion and connection in the team makes Havana’s life easier. She’s happy to leave the glamorous work (design and coding) to others in the team. Her role is managing the creative element more than contributing to it. To facilitate this she works to foster a collaborative and transparent working environment for client and agency alike.

Maintaining client relationships 

This internal alignment helps projects run smoothly but that’s not the only factor at play here. I ask Havana how her experience helps things run smoothly on the client side. She tells me that her experience at a not-for-profit housing association was a great foundation. Working there meant she saw first hand the structural issues and internal stresses the charity sector has to navigate. There are complexities and expectations that differ from corporate organisations. 

Most relevant to her role with Wholegrain is the experience of working in organisations with small teams and little excess capacity. People are often wearing multiple hats, with a diverse set of responsibilities. As charities and not-for-profits tend to run lean personnel wise, they sometimes need more time to consider ideas and digest discussions. 

Wholegrain’s clients are all purpose driven and meet our ethical screening criteria, but come from diverse sectors with different financing and structures.

Does working with a spectrum of organisations present a challenge to Havana and her PM colleagues? 

According to Havana the key to meeting this challenge is in building close relationships with all the clients you work with. It can require a lot of code switching during the week. You might go from a meeting with a smaller not-for-profit, straight into a call with a larger corporate client. Time pressures for these organisations can be different. A corporate with a higher budget might move more quickly, while at a charity the time pressure is internal. Smaller organisations might need more breathing space to carve out time to allow them to make the best decision.

Regardless of the type of client, a close relationship is nothing if you’re not delivering what you promise. Havana has to be pragmatic when considering timelines and deliverables. It’s not always possible to deliver the right solution straight away. This doesn’t mean you can’t meet a client deadline. But it does mean carefully managing client requirements with internal capacity. It’s a balancing act but one that Havana and Wholegrain are very adept at. 

Client and agency in harmony

I ask Havana what this looks like when it works best? She cites one of her larger clients, The International Association of Public Transport (UITP). She’s been working with them for the past two years, initially on a site build and then maintaining ongoing improvements and additional projects. Havana has facilitated a relationship between her contacts at UITP and the Wholegrain team that is both harmonious and effective.

It allows the agency and client to work collaboratively to continuously improve multiple sites.  This ensures that the user experience meets their audience needs in a performant, accessible and low carbon way. 

Humane Web and Project Management

This example of accessibility and sustainability brings us nicely to Havana’s role in building Humane Web sites. She comes back to the idea of the account and project management teams working as facilitators. Humane Web standards are generally researched, maintained and improved up by the UX, design and development teams. The proof is in the popularity, engagement and performance metrics that our sites attain . The alignment and trust she has with the agency as a whole means she can take the ideas and justification into her daily work. 

I ask if our approach can sometimes cause tension with clients? Our way of working is different from other agencies, being more holistic and sustainability focussed. In Havana’s experience tensions can arise but they tend to be short lived. Transparency and open communication smoothes the way.  

For new site builds, clients tend to be more open to low carbon solutions. After all, they’re clear on our vision, mission and process because of Bailey, Chris and anyone else in the proposal process More often the challenges arise with retainer clients where we are maintaining and improving an existing site. The vast majority of the time all that is required is an open conversation, backed by our experience, metrics and proof of concept, to persuade people that a Humane Web is right for them and their users. 

This user focus is a key part of our Humane Web Principles and what makes it popular with clients. As Tommy discussed in our last article, rather than looking for a specific functionality, Havana and the team will try to understand what the specific user need is for the site. With that defined we can now propose optimised, accessible, light weight solutions that meet user needs and improve site performance. 

In Havana’s experience, once clients see the benefits first hand, they are sold. Alignment is locked in and a more Humane Web approach becomes second nature. She knows it’s working when clients ask for advice rather than a specific solution. They want to collaborate to find the best choice for users. 

Falling down the Humane Web and Digital Sustainability rabbit hole

Learning about digital sustainability has been an eye opening experience for Havana. It wasn’t something at the core of her work in the past so there has been a lot to take in. Performance and optimisation have always been something to strive for in digital projects but adding the sustainability element takes it to the next level. Like most of the team, she finds it almost impossible not to run sites she finds through Website Carbon. She says she finds herself boring, sorry, educating friends and family when the topic of websites comes up. I know the feeling. 

I follow up questions about digital sustainability with the inescapable topic of AI. I view the subject through a sustainability and ethical lens but appreciate that this is different from how most approach the technology.

Like many in the agency, her approach has been considered. Where she’s found it works for her is by using tools like Granola to help with taking notes at meetings. In particular, a summarised transcript of technical discussions can be really helpful to aid research and understanding from her non-technical background. But she’s found the tools lacking where a human touch is required. Drafting documents or emails often feels like it lacks nuance. She wants her communication to be human and genuine and hasn’t found that GenAI can recreate this. 

Buying into purposeful business practices

As we wrap up, I wonder if working for a BCorp like Wholegrain has changed the way her perceptions about how businesses could operate. As with our digital sustainability approach, the agency’s working practices have been eye opening too. She’s found that her sustainable and ethical behaviours have been amplified by her time at Wholegrain. Internal policies like our vegetarian food policy have a knock on impact on your whole diet in a positive way. Working with engaged, purpose driven clients brings new perspectives and insights. She tells me she’s found herself engaging with ethical brands as a first port of call without realising the change. Looking for a BCorp aligned approach becomes second nature. 

I ask what aspects of Wholegrain’s approach she’d like to see more widely adopted. For her, it’s how digital accessibility is considered from the very start. Once you see what should happen it’s hard not to notice sites that don’t take this approach. Once you understand you start to see inaccessible colour schemes wherever they arise. 

December will mark three years of working at Wholegrain. To finish our conversation, I ask what Havana is most proud of in her time here. Her first instinct is to mention how she has built strong client relationships. Wholegrain encourages solid, open relationships with clients. For her it makes work more human and fun but also more effective. Better working relationships make for better, more user friendly sites. She then reflects on what she has brought to the team. Early on she saw opportunities to improve the process and structures for our Continuous Improvement clients. Her ideas, including each client having a workbook that provides a single source of truth for client and agency alike, has strengthened our working practices. 

If you’re working with Havana, you’re in extremely good hands. 

If you’d like this type of relationship during a site build or retainer relationship, get in touch with our Growth Manager, Bailey to discuss how Wholegrain could help you and your organisation.

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

Over recent months I’ve been speaking to various members of the team about how Wholegrain builds Humane Web experiences for our clients. Our MD Chris discussed how the agency is pushing the boundaries for ethical and sustainable web design. Bailey shone light on how we enable sustainable digital transformation. Tod showed how we put users first through our Discovery process. Chânelle talked about the joyful challenge of designing Humane websites.

This next conversation is with one of our senior developers. Tommy is our Technical Delivery Lead overseeing our coding standards, tech stack and much more.

This ended up being a more open ended conversation than some of the others in the series. At times it felt like a meditation on web development and coding, a calm and insightful conversation all at once.

Balance and board games

Our call started with me jealously coveting some Tintin wall art in the background of his office. It becomes clear that the simple artistic style of Herge’s comics offer an insight into who Tommy is. The analog nature of the books reflects his habit of getting away from the screen and technology as much as possible outside of work. Within the agency Tommy is renowned as a lover of board games. This sense of fun and competition translates well into inclusive and occasionally daft games to play on staff nights out. 

Tommy’s deep foundations with WordPress started 12 years ago in a tiny office in Worcester. At the time he was working with it as a user rather than a developer. Over time he started looking for coding solutions to solve challenges. The shift to WordPress developer began in earnest. In the intervening years a mixture of training, WordPress community participation, hands on experience and conference appearances have honed Tommy’s technical and problem solving skills to become a vital part of our developer team.

Today his experience and technical expertise make him the perfect fit for his role as Technical Delivery Lead. Internally he oversees the core codebase of our proprietary theme, owns the team tools and services and creates the process documentation that helps our team work smoothly. 

On the client work side he works closely with our Head of Experience, Tod on finding the right technical solutions for large, complex projects. His experience means he can be called upon for tricky tech support questions from clients and the dev team. 

Craftsmanship in coding

When Tommy talks about his work, the theme of craftsmanship comes up over and over again. He has a passion for making our sites as efficient, effective and robust as possible. While others in the team focus more on design and features, Tommy is busy ensuring our code base is crafted with care, attention and longevity in mind. 

Does this feel restrictive I wonder? 

A little perhaps, but Tommy views any constraints as a good thing, a structure to work within. He sees issues arising from adopting the latest CSS features. Wholegrain is in the business of building sites that have few barriers to entry. This includes technical barriers, where older devices or browsers can’t support the latest features reliably.Using a tool like Can I use to check how widely supported a new HTML or CSS feature is allows us to strike the right balance. Broadly speaking these features should be almost universally supported, but there is always room to manoeuvre given likely audiences and site intentions.

This brings us to another of the key themes I take from the conversation, balance. His “analogue” pastimes balance his technical, digital work. At work he pushes the agency to find balance in our output. This search has users at its main focus and means balancing usability, accessibility, sustainability and creativity. 

Does this impact how creative Wholegrain can be?

Not especially, particularly in light of Wholegrain’s sustainable and user focussed approach. In Tommy’s view, questions about how creative to be should always take into account a user’s needs. We should always be asking “what are you trying to solve”. Meeting user requirements is rarely a question of using the latest tech.

Respect your users and they will reward you

The best Wholegrain sites showcase our creativity without sacrificing usability and respect a user’s attention.  I ask if he has a favourite project where these elements come together. Operation Smile comes readily to mind. Wholegrain worked to improve their donation journey, which in Tommy’s words, was very nerdy work. 

The combination of complex coding and integrations, lots of important and open conversations and a worthy cause represents the best of what Wholegrain does. The end results were impactful too, resulting in a 141% increase in conversions, a reduced exit rate and most importantly a 161% increase in online donations. 

Sustainable Digital Transformation

Craft, efficiency and attention to detail is something that Tommy brings to our digital sustainability consulting projects. He loves helping to bring Wholegrain’s pedigree and experience to other organisations. 

Ever since Tom pioneered sustainable web development we’ve been building an institutional understanding of the issue. What seems obvious to our team is anything but obvious to other organisations. There is a joy in sharing our knowledge and watching understanding grow and behaviours change. Not only that but it’s a way of exploring issues away from our day to day or regular client base. 

It’s a learning experience for everyone involved and each project evolves our understanding. 

I’ve been asking other members of the team what aspect of Wholegrain’s working methods other agencies should adopt. His experiences of delving into some horribly tangled code bases informs his response. Developers should respect the craft of coding when it comes to creating websites. Choose quality over the cutting edge (or vibe coding).

This belief reflects his thoughts on AI coding too. Generative code, produced without a sense of craft or background in coding, is unlikely to meet Tommy’s strict standards when it comes to efficiency, simplicity or accessibility. Coupled to this, you’ve got to know who you are building a site for. 

There can be a massive difference between a site that will make your C-suite happy and a site that meets your user’s needs. AI’s tendency to support and reinforce your prompt rather than push back could exacerbate this problem. 

As you can see Tommy is the perfect person to set the standards for our sites. If you’d like a site crafted specifically for your users, people and planet, get in touch with Bailey to discuss a project.

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

I’ve been really excited to talk to Wholegrain’s Growth Manager, Bailey as part of our series introducing you to key members of our team. She is a true digital sustainability disciple and brings an energy and eclectic set of influences and ideas to all she does. Her role at the agency includes vetting potential new clients, pitching for projects, managing client projects and relationships as well as working to knit together our Sustainable Digital Transformation offering. 

I start our conversation asking about her inspirations. Typically she mentions a wide range of influences. Gardening features heavily in our initial discussions but otherwise a couple of newsletters stand out to me as illustrative. Creative Destruction and Dense Discovery are beautifully curated emails that aim to find connections and sense in an increasingly “noisy” world. They are inherently curious, pragmatic and realistic but also look to find joy and optimism where it can be found. All of these adjectives are descriptions I’d apply to Bailey too. 

Collaboration and BCorp alliances FTW

Connection and collaboration are key themes for Bailey. She is a keen advocate of the BCorp Agency Alliance. Her enthusiasm about the alignment she finds in this group, as well as a push towards collaborating for the greater good is infectious. While in other circumstances you might find agencies jostling for position, here there is a view that the collective is stronger when ethically driven agencies collaborate together. 

When I talk about her role at Wholegrain (WG), I put it to her that she could be seen as a bit of a protector of WG. Ethical screening and client and project alignment is of vital importance to how WG operates. Given that part of her role is to run prospective projects through the ethical screen policy does she see herself as a gatekeeper? 

She doesn’t quite agree with the characterization. It’s about calling aligned clients in, not blocking them out. Ethical screening is part of the picture but in reality it’s about spotting mutually beneficial relationships. You have to ask “can Wholegrain’s approach benefit a prospective client”? Will there be the right amount of synergy between client and agency to make things a roaring success? 

She points out that energy and effort in the team is not infinite. We have a holistic approach that benefits both clients and the Wholegrain team and we can’t do our best work if we’re overstretched. So Bailey sees part of her work as ensuring that those efforts are focussed on the right clients and the right projects. 

Sustainable Digital Transformation

Some of the most exciting projects Bailey has won for the agency recently are for our Sustainable Digital Transformation offering. Bailey tends to bring a positive energy to calls and meetings but when I start to discuss the transformation projects in the pipeline, this energy kicks up a notch (or three). 

Digital sustainability (DS) is what brought Bailey to Wholegrain. She describes when she first learned about the topic as being like a smack in the face. Our daily lives are digital and when you learn about the amount of energy and infrastructure that enables this you can’t help but be shocked. The scale can be mind blowing.

She cites emails as a powerful illustration.

• In 2025 approximately 376 billion emails were sent and received daily. That’s one hundred thirty-seven trillion two hundred forty billion (137,240,000,000,000) annually. 
• EcoSend estimates that this equates to an annual carbon footprint of 300 million tons CO₂ from emails worldwide.

There is a finite amount of energy that we can expend as a species and remain within safe planetary boundaries. But when your contribution to the problem remains almost infinitesimally small compared to the whole, what can you do? It can be hard to find a starting point to make improvements. As with so many sustainability issues it’s a case of starting small. Like many, Bailey discovered the Website Carbon tool at the start of her journey and it inspired her to greater action. 

The open sharing of knowledge that Website Carbon represents was an inspiration to Bailey. This transparency forms the cornerstone of her approach to DS and Sustainable Digital Transformation. But transparency and knowledge are nothing without positive action. “Like much of sustainability, DS is not a checkbox exercise. It’s a journey to better governance and behaviours”. 

Moving beyond carbon emissions

In many ways Bailey’s journey mirrors Wholegrain’s. Website Carbon represents a starting point, a way of benchmarking, with energy use and CO2e estimates as a metric. But at the core of Sustainable Digital Transformation is the concept of the Humane Web which moves things beyond carbon emissions.  

“CO2 has been the metric for so long but it’s a starting point.” It doesn’t take into account things like climate justice. “Climate change is unequally damaging”. While we in the global north benefit from access to digital services, the harm this causes is often visited on the global south. Issues like E-waste processing, low paid data tagging, arduous and dehumanising content moderation, resource extraction and climate change are all issues felt more keenly in developing nations. At the same time those nations can suffer from low data zones meaning a lack of access and lack of digital benefits. 

Our transformation services aim to take a more global view. Low cost digital platforms and storage have often created messy digital estates. As Bailey puts it “expansion without architecture is chaos”. As with the newsletters Bailey loves, you need to take a holistic view and look for connections, positivity, optimisation and solutions. This leads to asking questions like:

• How do your digital platforms fit together? 
• How do you improve usability for all? 
• How do you bake sustainability and accessibility into your projects from the start? 
• How do you facilitate digital decisions being made quickly, both internally and externally? 

Paradoxes and misconceptions 

From the outside it might seem paradoxical that the creators or Website Carbon are moving away from CO2e as the key element for digital sustainability. Bailey argues that it shows the field is maturing. After years of measuring, benchmarking and considering the sources of digital emissions, she sees Wholegrain as having the experience and mindset required to move the conversation and field forwards. 

I ask if Bailey sees any misconceptions around Wholegrain and the work we do. If there are any, they’re around how the web design process should happen. Too many agencies offer ungrounded designs that over-promise on their capabilities but end up under delivering.

The misconception is that it’s possible to create a fit purpose design without carrying out an effective exploratory discovery process. The findings from the process feed into our iterative design process. All of this allows us to deliver strong designs that not only look great but also work for you and your audience in the short, medium and long term.

Alignment is key here too. When Bailey lands work for clients who are completely aligned in purpose, mission and direction, the results are outstanding.

I ask what this alignment looks like in practice and Bailey cites one of the first projects she brought on board at Wholegrain, Environment Bank. From the very start of the process, there was total alignment, trust and collaboration. With both sides trusting the process and some award winning branding to work with, the result is a site that matches their aims. It’s handsome, robust and supports the work they do. 

Bailey points out that this idea of robustness highlights another misconception around Wholegrain and our process. We won’t only build a site that looks good but also one that is long lived, secure and maintainable. We sometimes inherit sites that look good on the front end but are messy to update and manage at the back end. Cutting corners and moving too quickly at the outset of a project can add technical debt and hugely increase the lifetime cost of a website, or necessitate a full rebuild. 

Why, why, why?

I remind Bailey that she is nearly two years into her time here and ask her what she’s learnt since joining the agency. “Asking why is more important than how or when”. To Bailey’s mind many of the issues we’ve discussed come up because not enough people ask about “the why”. If you don’t know “the why”, you can’t accurately answer how something needs to happen or when it could be finished. 

I can’t leave the conversation without asking about AI, a topic I know she has strong thoughts on. “Tech should enable our lives and not be a destination where we spend our lives”. Much of the AI discourse seems to be about integrating technology into every element of our lives. It’s not clear if the benefits outweigh the costs, be they financial, environmental or societal. If AI lives up to the hype, then maybe the benefits will outweigh the costs after all. 

She appreciates Wholegrain’s considered approach to the technology, pragmatically using solutions where appropriate. Integrating Holp onto the UKGBC site is one such example. Much of Wholegrain’s work is about making things as efficient as possible, so users can find answers and spend their time elsewhere afterwards, while minimising the impact at the same time. Weighing up the pros and cons of a service like Holp allows us to do that.

Ultimately, the evolution of DS and Wholegrain means that our digital experiences are meeting human needs. Our services and working practices can offer inspiration to others. We continue to show that you can put your users first while respecting and protecting the planet and humanity as a whole.

If you’ve been considering making your site more tailored to your community and mission, Bailey is all ears!

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

So far in this series I’ve spoken to Tod about our Discovery process and Chânelle about Designing for a Humane Web. Both these pieces give an insight into the processes the agency follows. But in this piece we’ll look at the bigger picture and talk to our MD Chris about how he is guiding Wholegrain. It’s nearly 3 years since Chris took over the day to day running of Wholegrain from founders Tom and Vineeta. It’s been a time of internal change but the direction has remained steadfast – building websites (and by extension a web) that are better for people and planet.

This article will give a better idea of what inspires and influences Chris, his thoughts on the sustainability space and his vision for the future of Wholegrain

Inspiration

I kick off our chat by asking what influences Chris both personally and professionally. I already know he’s one of the B Community’s foremost experts on vegan hot spots so I steer clear of this topic as it might derail my research. Chris describes himself as a serial hobbyist. “If it’s creative and something you can learn, I’m pretty much going to say yes – from pottery to sewing to painting, I’m happy using my hands to make something.” Having previously seen Chris’s incredible hand made backpack this definitely rings true. 

More surprising is a keen interest in Architecture. Chris is careful to stress that he’s got no idea of the names of buildings or even architects involved. For him it’s “about the impact space, light or form can have on you as a person”. When faced with a difficult project or decision he’ll often take these thoughts to different buildings or spaces. The simple act of changing your surroundings can be a great way of unsticking an issue. “It’s so interesting how something like a building, that is fundamentally about shelter and survival, can also provide creativity and emotion.” 

I’m keen to find out a little about his professional inspirations too. He comes alive when describing the creative services offered by Nice and Serious. “To me, they were a driving force behind what I think of when it comes to creativity for good.”. He’s reverent about the lack of ego and self promotion in their work and I hear echoes of what Wholegrain does best when he talks about “quality, creative work that is for the people who need it”. 

Dispelling the myth that BCorps only celebrate other BCorps, he also mentions the work Reuben Turner is doing at Rewild. He’s taken with the “gorgeous simplicity to how he approaches creativity” and the humanity of his work. Nowhere is this humanity more apparent than on his Five Things page. The distillation of Rewild’s philosophy into five simple pillars is something I see in Chris’s approach too, as well as the treatise that “Allies always win”. 

As a leader of a celebrated agency I’m interested in other organisations that Chris looks to for leadership and operational ideas. He highlights humanity as being incredibly important to him and it’s a theme that we will revisit over and over again in our conversation. Chris looks for organisations outside of the agency and BCorp bubbles to find people that live and breathe their values on a micro and macro level.

He highlights Hearth as an example. The Wholegrain team recently visited this social enterprise community bakery in Hackney. They “operate in such a circular way that when you see it, you can’t help but be inspired. The impact that individual people can have on the fundamental needs of others and the planet is really inspiring. I want that to be something I distill into Wholegrain.”

Wholegrain and the Humane Web

Humanity has always been important within Wholegrain and how we operate on a day to day basis. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the pioneering work done on Sustainable Web Design. It’s an oft repeated line but our founder Tom, literally wrote the book on the subject. Under Chris’s leadership, Wholegrain has been evolving. Sustainability is still a key but our operations and philosophy are becoming more holistic. Enter the concept of the Humane Web. 

As Chris puts it:

“For a long time Wholegrain has been at the forefront of digital sustainability but we also know that alone is not enough. The reality is that the internet needs far more nuance than just making it sustainable from a technical point of view – it should work for every person that needs it, wherever they are and however they access it. A Humane Web is the defined vision of that thought and it perfectly sums up how Wholegrain has evolved its ways of working over the past couple of years.”

The Humane Web concept is changing Wholegrain on a technical, operational and foundational level.

“Its changed the shape of our business and led to creating roles within our team that focus on experience design and technical delivery alongside the more traditional agency roles to design and build websites. It goes past the idea of ‘user centric’ and instead builds websites that enable users to define what that even means for them individually as they engage with your site – as an example, it leads us to consider users who want exploration and fact gathering in order to convert with equal weight to those who want quick conversion. 

Self paced, accessible both in terms of design and data and high performance built in, are key to everything we do.”

Low weight, highly performant, robustly coded and accessible Wordpress sites remain at the core of everything we do as an agency. We’ll be committed to building low carbon websites as long as we operate. But this evolving approach has allowed us to look beyond websites to be able to offer something more transformative. 

“We have crafted and defined a new service offering that stitches the work we do together across accessibility, sustainability and data inequality for organisations to go past just their website and consider the impact of their entire digital estate. Sustainable Digital Transformation is the best way to evolve and future proof everything digital in your organisation. 

It’s a really exciting evolution of what Wholegrain can do to further the mission of a Humane Web.”

I suggest that this approach might be seen to be at odds with the actions of the big tech firms that shape the way we browse and live online in today’s society. Invasive data gathering and massive data centre growth pushes on regardless of the societal and environmental costs they reap. 

How does he navigate that tension?

“The tension is definitely there but so is the simple fact that a more humane website is a better performing website in all areas. I hold that front and centre whenever we hit that tension because I don’t think there is any brief or hurdle that I’ve seen that can’t be solved with it. If you want to increase performance, a sustainable site does that. If you want increased conversion rates, robust experience design will deliver that. 



We can’t change big tech but we can show organisations and individuals that there is another, greener, fairer, more effective way.”

Inevitably Generative AI sneaks into the conversation at this point. I ask what one word springs to mind when Chris thinks of AI. After a moment’s thought, he settles on “regressive”. It’s not the technology itself that feels regressive rather the models the platforms are based on. 

“Any model, in any area of life, that is based on mass data input and then making decisions based on averages – feels regressive.” This belief has played a part in Wholegrain taking a cautious approach to AI adoption. As with any digital agency, it’s a constant presence in client and technical discussions. For the time being Chris doesn’t see this approach changing. 

Never say never though. 

“As we get further clarity on the benefits and negatives, there is definitely room for a more sympathetic and considered way of using AI and Wholegrain will follow that path.”

The bigger picture

Anyone who works in, or adjacent to the sustainability and purpose driven “sectors” will recognise that the past few years have been tough. The push back against environmental protections and equality by the Trump regime has sent unwanted ripples across the world. Charities and sustainability focussed organisations have suffered. Chris and others in Wholegrain’s leadership have worked tirelessly to protect the agency and team against this backdrop. 

More positively it looks like there are green shoots of recovery starting to become visible. The successes of Zohran Mamdani in New York and Hannah Spencer for the Green Party in Gorton and Denton have provided succour. Their successful campaigns have also marked a shift in sustainability messaging. Equality and quality of life are the core messages with sustainability an important but less explicit policy point. It’s something Chris and I have discussed a lot recently. 

I ask what organisations like Wholegrain could learn from this shift in approach and messaging. 

“Whilst Wholegrain has always led in digital sustainability, there is a legacy and baggage that comes with the word ‘sustainability’. That realisation runs parallel to a second, which is that in the world as it exists in 2026, what’s important is humanity. We see that with the evolution of the Green Parties core messaging and we will start to see that with Wholegrain evolution over the year ahead as we start to position ourselves more authentically to the agency we are now.” 

As I start to wrap up the conversation I ask what aspect of Wholegrains’ ethos he’d like to see other organisations and competitors adopt. Again, humanity is a key influence. 

“Short wins don’t benefit like long term impact does. I struggle to see why that wouldn’t be something that doesn’t steer your approach when it so clearly benefits the quality of your output, the impact of digital on the environment, the experience of the user and the clients ability to meet their goals.”

Additionally there is sometimes a lack of true authenticity in the “business for good” sector. Conversations with prospective clients in the sustainability space can be frustrating. “The amount of purpose or impact driven organisations that don’t live the same values in their digital space when the benefits are so undeniable on all levels.”.

As we often say in our presentations, digital is physical. You can’t separate your online and offline actions and decisions and policies when it comes to equality and sustainability. There is an idea that story telling and impact on a website comes from autoplay videos and heavyweight javascript powered features. Performance and environmental impact be damned. 

For my final question I keep things nice and easy.

What’s the thing that Chris is most proud of in his first 3 years at Wholegrain?

After mildly berating me for the question he considers and settles on “resilience”. As I mentioned earlier the past few years (most of Chris’s time in charge in fact) haven’t been made any easier by external factors. 

“Wholegrain has a legacy that was definitely heavy to carry when I first started and as a sector, agencies have not had an easy few years, but we are still here, still innovating and still moving the needle on what a purpose led business in our space can do. I’m proud of that.”  

For me, the most important thing innovative and ethical businesses and organisations can do is continue doing what they are doing. They have to keep carrying the torch and inspiring others to do better. With Chris at the helm, the Humane Web as a guiding light and resilience as a core tenet, Wholegrain looks well set to do just that. 


You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

*Author’s note. In early drafts of this article I used phrases like “flesh out” or “adding meat to the bones” which are wildly inappropriate for our proudly plant powered MD. I briefly thought about using “adding pulses to the salad” but it didn’t quite land. If you’ve got plant based metaphors to use in place of carnivorous ones, drop me an email…

In our last article we discovered the Wholegrain Discovery process. Tod explained how the process helps align our projects and identify Experience Principles. But when the Discovery phase is over and we’ve identified these principles, what’s next? 

This is when our UI/UX designer Chânelle gets involved and her design magic brings things to life. When I think about her a few things spring readily to mind.  

• The holder of the unofficial title for “most desirable interior design in the background of video calls” at Wholegrain
• A “Ghost Sign” enthusiast
• A fount of NeilsonNorman knowledge
• A taker of (too?) many photos while travelling

But most importantly for this article she’s Wholegrains’ design lead. Since 2020 Chânelle has been helping craft sites with users and the planet in mind.

I chatted with Chânelle about her influences, process and where she takes design inspiration from. 

If you’re lucky enough to be a Wholegrain client you’ll have seen her sorcery in action. If you’re not yet a Wholegrain client, read on to find out why you should be… 

About Chânelle

I kicked things off by asking how she would describe the sites she designs for Wholegrain’s. After a moment’s pause she settles on “clean and considered”. It’s a great summation of our diverse portfolio. Clean design with users considered above all else. Chânelle is on a mission to help create sites that endure and work for all users. 

She explains that there are layouts, patterns and conventions that just work for websites. They allow users to find information quickly. If you can use these conventions it allows you to be creative elsewhere, without sacrificing usability.

Design Inspiration

If the devil is in the detail, where does she find inspiration for those details? As you’d expect from an experienced designer, her inspiration comes from far and wide. Magazines, blogs, her travels, mid-century design and of course websites of all shapes and sizes. 

Regular visits to places like Awwwards means Chânelle is on top of the latest trends in web design. I find this interesting because like most of the team at Wholegrain, if I see a site I like on Awwwards, the first thing I do is check out its carbon score on Website Carbon. More often than not, they are cutting edge but have poor performance scores.

As it turns out Chânelle does the same! What she looks for are features that might work for our clients. From there she works with our developers to see if it’s possible to reverse engineer them with lower weight code. Cutting edge features with lower carbon scores. 

Away from the flashy stuff, places like SiteInspire, LowwwwCarbon and intriguingly, Brutalist Websites feature in her bookmarks on her browser. When she tells me this I have to pause our chat to check out the Brutalist site as Chânelle watches on. She’s smiling as I scroll because hardly any of the site designs are appropriate for any of our client’s sites!

She explains that she likes that the nature of these sites lets the content do the talking and often in a low weight way. Even if the aesthetic isn’t appropriate, the design language can be and looking at these sites provides useful touchstones for her designs.

Designing for a Humane Web in practice

As you’d expect for Wholegrain, Chanelle’s designs have accessibility, usability and sustainability built in from the very beginning. So knowing a bit more about where her inspiration comes from, I’m keen to understand how she uses her years of experience to create designs that fit with our Humane Web approach. 

“Sites should be designed with all users in mind,” she says.

That means 

• Working to AA WCAG standards as a minimum
• Colour combos are verified and changed if required. (Clients can sometimes change their brand guidelines to be more accessible because of this)  
• Fonts chosen for legibility rather than following a trend 
• Important information and hierarchy are prioritised to allow users to easily navigate the sites

Encouragingly, accessibility recommendations are the most readily accepted by clients.

And what of designing with the planet in mind? What measures does Chânelle employ to keep the weight of a site down? 

For her it’s all about pragmatism coupled with sustainable design knowledge. The lowest page weight possible for each use case or user journey is the right approach. Optimising and minimising is more important than the lowest overall weight. 

A donation journey is a good example.  Including heavier elements, such as videos, animations or images often makes for a more engaging and effective experience. Increased engagement equates to maximised donations for important causes. Sacrificing fundraising for increased lower carbon scores isn’t justifiable. Minimising the carbon score for the right features is. 

A close relationship with the dev team is important here. There’s no point in designing a feature that isn’t possible within the low weight methodology that Wholegrain is so proud of. 

And what about client relationships? A Humane Web approach means that corners can’t be cut. On the face of it, it might seem that simple, effective designs are easier to create. In reality the opposite is true. There’s nowhere to hide for these types of designs. Information has to be readily available, not obfuscated by vertical scrolling and distracting transitions. Explaining design decisions in this context relies on buy in from clients and clear communication from our side. 

In Chânelle’s experience there is a difference between what the design and development community vote for on site showcases and what users actually want. A lot of the heavier features you see on showcases like Awwwards are not actually very popular with users.

Usability takes precedence over flashy features. 

The Humane Web approach in action

2026 looks likely to see this Humane Web approach really take flight. Tantalisingly some of the design work that Chânelle is most excited about is just over the horizon. When I ask what we should be looking forward to she mentions some client sites that are currently in development and a rebranded suite of Wholegrain sites that should launch later this year. I’ve seen some of these designs and agree that they’re pushing the boundaries of what a “sustainable website” looks like.  

Watch this space for some beautifully usable and accessible sites launching in 2026.  They are going to show the industry what a better web can look like for all of us.

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

One of the most tantalising prospects of the internet is having the sum total of human knowledge just a couple of clicks away. The challenge is narrowing down all the options to find the relevant information you need.

If you’ve grown up in parallel with the internet as I have, you’ll have seen numerous ways of meeting this challenge. From narrow but reliable options like Encarta, to early search engines offering a glimpse into the wider world, to algorithms offering personalisation to nascent AI driven services and drivers, all are attempting the same thing; fast, relevant curation of information. 

A challenge for membership platforms

For specialist membership platforms and content driven organisations this is an acute challenge. Audiences demand relevant, up to date and engaging content that cuts through the noise of the internet. Platforms need to find commercially viable ways of providing this type of content through subscriptions and premium tiers. Not only that, in a world of AI generated content and a challenging attention economy they also face challenges such as:

• Whether to have a narrow or wide content focus? 
• How to effectively curate content?  
• How to stay relevant and engaging?

At Wholegrain we collaborate with our clients to help meet this challenge head on. Let’s dig a little deeper into the issue and then explore some of the solutions.

Curation methods

Content rarely arrives on CD-ROMs nowadays and curation takes a wide array of forms. For membership platforms we see three broad curation methodologies that work effectively:

Human driven curation on a specific topic

Organisations with a specialist focus provide trusted sources of expertise across the web. There are numerous examples but in a Wholegrain article it seems relevant to choose two that are close to our hearts.

Our client, Carbon Brief is a UK-based website covering the latest developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy. Their site provides a wealth of well written, data rich content on a range of climate topics. Their daily briefing emails provide comprehensive breakdowns of the latest climate news. 

Our own Curiously Green newsletter does the same thing. We pull together the latest news, resources and regulations relating to the humane web and digital sustainability, sending regular emails to our subscribers. 

Human driven curation that pulls together narrative threads

A favourite newsletter among the Wholegrain Team is Dense Discovery. Described as “Thoughtfully curated links from a noisy web” it doesn’t focus on any particular topic. Rather it does an incredible job of tying together disparate topics and elements in a pleasing alchemy. We often end up seeing things that aren’t usually part of our algorithms and we’re generally glad to see them. It’s a hard trick to pull off and needs an open minded reader to work effectively.

Away from the digital world, I thought of William Gibson’s Blue Ant series of novels here too. They weave popular culture, technology, fashion and global politics into coherent and connected narratives. Curation can be artful as well as commercial. 

Machine driven curation

You can split this into two broad sub categories, algorithmic and of course AI driven.

Algorithmic curation comes from machine learning based on user habits. Analysing user behaviour reveals patterns and connections allowing related and relevant recommendations to be made. Spotify springs to mind here. Its recommendation algorithm can provide a comfortable, familiar set of recommendations and playlists based on your listening habits, but informed by behaviours across the user base.

On the AI side of things I find a platform called Finchling an intriguing prospect. Describing itself as “Intelligent media monitoring” that “helps brands, comms & PR teams find press opportunities, and monitor what competitors are getting coverage for”. It pulls together relevant information for your organization and prioritizes risk and opportunity.  

Challenges and opportunities in content curation

The obvious opportunity here is that you can add value and retain an audience if you are providing information that is relevant to them. On the commercial side you can provide invaluable service within a sector. It can build brand authority and reputation as well as offering monetisation avenues. From a more holistic point of view you can share vital and important information with a wider audience, encouraging behaviour change. 

But there are challenges to doing content curation well too. If you make your focus too narrow users could lose the opportunity to make unexpected discoveries and links across topics. However, if you spread yourself too thin you risk losing relevance among your audience. 

I came back to Spotify here. As time went on I found that its algorithm became less effective. I was listening to less new music as my feed became more and more homogenous. It was frustratingly difficult to break new musical ground. I switched to Deezer and have found it does a better job but still not perfectly. Ultimately I find myself going to places like Six Music’s playlists to find new music. It’s curated by people with (I assume) similar music tastes to mine and an openness to new acts and genres. It’s doing what I found an algorithm could not.

Balancing access and gate keeping 

A particular challenge in the new media landscape is allowing access to your content while paying the bills. Paywalls can be vital for organisations but can put off digital natives who are used to free access. Adding value to your user base and providing exclusive info while keeping your casual audience engaged is a tricky balancing act. I find that 404 Media threads this needle quite well. Their articles are great and free to access for the most part. But the reporting they provide is niche enough to have a loyal, paying audience who see the value in the stories they tell.

Solving the problem with Humane Web Principles

Whatever methodology is most relevant to your organization, it won’t work effectively without a well thought out application or website to back it up. At Wholegrain we are guided by our Humane Web Principles when approaching these challenges. We build with the human in mind crafting self-paced online experiences for diverse needs. Curation is nothing without design choices that empowers audiences.

At the core of this is the Discovery Process. To make the right design choices and streamline curation workflows you have to answer certain questions. You need to know your audience and whether they want a narrow or wide focus to remain engaged. Are they only interested in a specific topic or are they open to being introduced to related areas by experts they trust?

Discovery always illuminates internal factors. It helps identify the key curators within a team and help enable them to effectively use the back end of a website. Interviews and discussions help identify the themes and content types within an organisation’s digital estate as well as how best to showcase them.

It can also help find tech solutions to help streamline workflows. Can analytics help identify what your audience resonates with? Can AI bring something to the party? Regardless of the tech side, it’s the humans in the process that provide the secret sauce. Why should someone subscribe to a membership service or newsletter if there isn’t human oversight taking time to organise and curate your information?

Wrapping up

Curation done well requires knowing your audience and an in-depth knowledge of the topics you are curating. The innate understanding of the topic comes from your experience and expertise and this, in turn, gives some insight into your audience too. However to really get to know your audience and their needs requires something more; discovery and iteration.

Taking time to confirm your understanding of your audience and their requirements is a must. The way we engage with our audience evolves over time along with their needs.

Testing, checking, and creating opportunities for growth from audience led insights. Reach out to our team if you would like to know more.

Most countries’ government websites already prioritise accessibility, however the European Union is ensuring its usability doesn’t just stop at government websites, many product and service websites will be affected too. 

As of 28th June 2025, the European Accessibility Act 2025 comes into effect requiring any business that is trading, or plans to trade, in the EU needs to provide accessible digital services. This also affects UK businesses that provide services to EU consumers and to public or private bodies that are in the scope.

Why does web accessibility matter?

Our founder, Tom Greenwood, described this clearly when writing about the public sector accessibility regulations for the UK in 2019. Succinctly, it comes down to the fact “a huge part of our world is now online, if we don’t take accessibility seriously then people with disabilities will be excluded, creating a two-tiered society.”

What do the European Accessibility Act 2025 regulations require?

The Design for All (DfA) approach is a design philosophy for products, services and systems to have maximum usability by as many people as possible without the need for adaptation. This philosophy was responsible for the development of the European Standard on Design for All, published in 2019. In the same year the European Accessibility Act (EAA) was officially published by the European Union.

The regulations are not new as such, but the deadline for implementing them, June 28 2025 is now fast approaching. 

So what are the key requirements for websites?

• Depending on which EU country is involved, websites must at least meet WCAG 2.1 compliance at level AA. Ensuring that websites are WCAG 2.2 compliant at level AA is a more prudent, robust and future proof approach.
• Non-text content such as images, videos and products must have associated alternative text providing clear, simple descriptions for screen reading technology .
• All parts of the website should be usable with just keyboard navigation.
• Audio and video, must be accompanied by captions or transcriptions and offer alternative formats. Auto play of videos should be avoided.
• Adaptable website design so it can be adjusted to suit different needs, such as changing text size or colours for better readability.

Accessibility is not a feature, it is a universal human right

Universal design isn’t new or novel. The result of designing for additional needs, benefits everyone, sometimes in ways we couldn’t have predicted.

• The dropped curb? Originally created to assist wheelchair users, also benefits people pushing a pram, shopping trolley, or suitcase.
• The electric toothbrush? Designed for those who lacked the movement or dexterity to brush thoroughly, and now many people own one as it can clean your teeth more effectively.
• The world wide web? Yup! Even in its inception, the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Burner’s Lee created it with universal design in mind. He stated: “The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect”.

The above are three examples of things we all benefit from frequently, if not daily. 

When the web was launched, it prioritised universal accessibility. However, when you release things into the public domain, you lose control of how people adapt it. Legislation and laws are often required to maintain our universal human rights, especially as we continually iterate and improve our digital platforms.

Happily there are many people and organisations who took it upon themselves to make sure this knowledge is shared and accessible to drive change sooner. Here are a handful of those improving accessibility through education, community alliances and free tools:

• WCAG 1.0 was published in 1999 and 26 years on WCAG 3 is fast approaching;
  • You can evaluate WCAG standards for webpages with WAVE.
  • Reminder! For the EAA 2025, as a minimum, websites must meet WCAG 2.1 compliance at level AA.
• The A11y Project is a community-driven effort to make digital accessibility easier as well as providing a list of resources.
• Web Sustainability Guidelines which was created by the W3C Sustainable Web Design community group. Designing for not only audience needs, but data & WiFi bandwidth means that no one is hindered from information or interactions online based on data inequality.
• WebAIM colour contrast checker is a useful, free tool to validate colour combinations in design.
• Accessibility Insights is a free browser extension to test accessibility of webpages and web applications.

Wholegrain supports all moves that increase inclusion online

We’re encouraged that accessibility protections are written into law and continually iterated. However for us, accessibility online has always been and continues to be non-negotiable, meaning anything we create is done through the lens of universally accessible digital design.

We’ll keep doing what we’re already doing, putting the human behind the screen, first.

This is exactly why we prioritise user testing because without representation, we can never truly understand how to create a fully inclusive digital experience.

From a UX standpoint, accessibility is intertwined with usability. When we design with accessibility in mind, we’re creating experiences that are not only compliant but also intuitive and enjoyable for everyone. Accessibility means removing barriers for people with disabilities, but it also enhances the experience for all.

For example, clear navigation and logical content hierarchy improve usability for those using screen readers, while also benefiting people in noisy environments or those unfamiliar with a website. Captioning videos helps people with hearing impairments but also supports those watching content in quiet spaces. Keyboard navigation is essential for people with mobility challenges and it also improves efficiency for those who prefer shortcuts.

Designing for accessibility encourages empathy, helping us focus on the diverse ways people interact with the web. It ensures that we’re building websites that are not just functional but delightful and impactful, reinforcing trust and inclusivity. For Wholegrain, accessibility isn’t a box to tick, it’s an integral part of creating human-centered, sustainable digital experiences that serve everyone.

It’s important to restate our mission to frame our position on accessibility:

Sustainable web design is accessible design.

In a world that is increasingly prioritising algorithms and non-human users, we stand strong in putting the people using a website front and centre. Through collaboration, we can uncover usability we’d never discover on our own, that discovery may even benefit you one day!

Happy Black Friday!

To prepare ourselves for the most wonderful, consumption driven time of the year, my wife and I watched Buy Now on Netflix last night.

Not so much Netflix’n’chill as Netflix’n’seethe.

As efforts to decarbonise our economy and society continue to gather momentum (perhaps in spite of COP29), the film provides a reminder that overconsumption is a parallel issue in need of tackling. From a web designer’s point of view the core messages from the film are stark: 

• Overconsumption for the sake of profit is rife in the developed world
• Planned obsolescence in tech and throw-away fashion encourages dangerous consumption
• The developing world is drowning in waste from the developed world 
• Websites, digital platforms and highly effective UX all contribute to this problem

In this time of climate crisis, the web design industry needs to take note of these issues and act accordingly. 

The birth of frictionless UX

The opening section of the film features the early days of Amazon.com and Maren Costa, Amazon’s first Principal User Experience Designer. In the early days, Amazon focused its efforts on making purchasing on the site as simple and efficient as possible. Millions of experiments and data points were analysed to not only remove friction in the process, but to actively encourage people to buy, even if they were just browsing. The lessons learned at Amazon have since been replicated and refined across the internet.

But it’s not just the UX patterns and methodologies that have been honed. Website and digital platform messaging and SEO techniques have helped spread messages encouraging unchecked consumption and greenwashing far and wide.

The message to me was clear. The sad truth is that the craft of our industry is part of the problem and that web design agencies (including B Corps) help encourage excessive consumption.

Just as every job is a climate job, every website can be a climate website. Website messaging and UX is a powerful message delivery system. We know this to be true and sell that vision to clients in every project we undertake. Using the most effective methods to spread information about the climate crisis, alternative business models and customer solutions can help turn the tide. 

What can web designers, marketers and agencies do?

Given that we are discussing consumption, e-commerce is the obvious place to start. Committing to putting choice back in the hands of the user and removing consumption-encouraging nudges can help change the psychology of purchasing. Instead, let’s support purchasing choices with transparency. Clearly showing the materials, provenance, supply chain, life cycle analysis, end of life options, resale value and communities supported gives users the power to make more informed decisions. Northern Playground, a brand I’ve written about recently, do this brilliantly.

Similarly, it seems to me that some friction could be added back into the process to help respect users and the planet. One click purchase journeys feature heavily in the film. Removing those easy options and developing more conscientious UX patterns, giving users space and agency to make purchasing decisions is the ethical thing to do. Perhaps more controversially, I would advocate for removing services like Klarna to discourage unaffordable consumption and debt. 

Showcase the alternatives

Something else I’ve noted is the priority (or lack thereof) alternative business models are given by brands. Brands like Mud Jeans have prominent rental and take back schemes on their websites. Other brands with similar schemes hide these options away. Giving equal or higher positioning for circular products helps show users that alternatives to liner consumption are available.

Talk about it!

Over and above the tech solutions are the human connection solutions. A theme from the film is people having realisations that their day to day work is harming the planet and recognising that nobody is talking about it. Maren at Amazon built an employee climate justice programme which forced Jeff Bezos to at least acknowledge the problem. Nirav Patel’s recognition that the products he was designing for Facebook and Apple lead to discussions about how to do things better. As a result, Framework was born, providing computers built with repairability and end of life in mind.

Talking to friends and colleagues about the climate crisis and how it affects your personal and professional life might be the most important action you could take. Holding space for this enables discussions to take place. It’s something we’re doing at Wholegrain. Hopeful conversations and sharing of ideas might just be the thing that helps save the world.

If you’ve watched Buy Now, let me know what you think. – curiouslygreen@wholegraindigital.com.

Other than working on all things Curiously Green one of the other things I do for Wholegrain is provide a weekly round up of sustainability news to the team.  This involves connecting digital sustainability with topics like privacy, general sustainability, community building and the offline world.

The round up is occasionally (ok, always) a bit spicier than the newsletter. You’ll have to get a job with Wholegrain if you want to see it. In recent weeks though the average scoville level has risen due to a noticeable lack of positive news and solutions hitting the feed.  

It could be that the movers and shakers of the sustainability world are all bouncing around the busy summit season and don’t have time to share things. Maybe it’s the anxiety caused by US politics bleeding into other facets of life? Either way the autumn feels to have started on a downer. 

The RSS feeds I’ve curated for myself, tech communities I’m part of, podcasts I listen to and the people I follow all seem pretty glum at the moment. There are petty squabbles in the Wordpress community, rising emissions from big tech, AI is in everything, net zero commitments are rolling back.  

It’s making this Curiously Green manager somewhat blue and I wonder if other digital sustainability folks might feel the same.

A problem shared is a problem solved…

In these circumstances, I find that community mindedness is often the answer. So, as 2024 draws to a close, I thought it would be useful to crowdsource a little joy, optimism and solidarity. 

We are asking our Curiously Green community:

• What was the most impactful sustainability action you took this year?
• What digital sustainability action did you take this year?
• What is your biggest sustainability challenge for 2025?
• What would you like to read more about in CG in 2025?

To kick things off I’ll share mine – 

1. My most impactful action was changing our petrol car for an EV. We live in the French Alps with minimal public transport options. When we analysed our family footprint an EV was the next step that we could take. So far, our e-Kona is working very well but we’re waiting to see what winter brings! 
2. On the digital sustainability (DS) side I educated myself! I connected my work life with wider sustainability issues by taking a Carbon Literacy course. The course connected a lot of dots for me and changed the way I see the world. A Digital and Technology specific course will be released this autumn. If you want a DS resolution for the new year I highly recommend attending a course.
3. I think my biggest DS challenge will be the same as the wider industry – AI. Grappling with its proliferation and how to work within the tech space without using it is a challenge, let alone influencing others. Of course the bubble might burst and deal with things for me!
4. The biggest thing I’d like to see (and write about) on Curiously Green is positive DS stories from the Curiously Green community. Solutions, ideas, innovation and inspiration are what the world needs right now.

You can share your responses via the button below. If you are happy to share with the wider community I will showcase some of the best responses in a future post and newsletter. 

Thank you! 

Andy

As the temperature drops, the land starts to bed in for winter and days shorten, conference season in the purpose space kicks off in force!

As a very vocal ‘business hippie’ who loves to mark the passing of the seasons in our day-to-day operations- and a parent who has just ‘survived’ the summer holidays – it always comes as a shock to me that this energetic time of year falls now when, I’m not going to lie, I often feel exhausted. But then, year in, year out I am surprised by how much I actually need this time out with like minded people and businesses to rejuvenate, to stoke the passion and to come back to the team brimming with ideas and actions. So, from September, here are my takeaways from attending B Corp’s Louder Than Words and GoodFest, for which I am incredibly grateful. I hope they bring some positive warming vibes of sunshine to your autumn days. 

The Power of Dreaming

GoodFest’s theme for 2024 was ‘Dream Big, Act Now’ which was at the forefront of all discussions. I was fortunate enough to attend a brilliant workshop with Carlos and Laurence from The Happy Startup School – check them out if you’ve not already heard of them! – who raised the topic of ‘Effortless Impact – do good, be happy’. That’s the dream, right? A lot of themes and learnings came out from this one session for me, but one of the most important learnings was to acknowledge the power of dreaming and the ideas that come out as a result of taking the opportunity to dream. Think about it – when was the last time you sat down and asked yourself things like, ‘What would you bring to life if anything was possible?’, ‘What would you love to master that excites your soul?’.

This power of dreaming really struck a note for not only me, but also for the whole event for it is indeed the dreamers and the creatives who will provide the solutions to the challenges we face.

In a particularly powerful session, Kalpana Arias, climate activist; ecosomatics educator and founder of Nowadays On Earth, referenced the brilliant Saidiya Hartman reminding us that ‘One of the powers of oppression is policing the imaginations’ and that it is indeed a privilege to be able to dream. And that dreaming cannot be in isolation and, as I will come to later, collaboration is as vital in future developments as it is for dreaming – on your own you are one crazy guy dancing, as Matt Hocking would share, but together we are a rave. Share those ideas and dreams, they might not go anywhere, but they might grow and in the case of our founders; 17 years later a 40 year old woman might be sitting at her desk writing a blog post about the power of dreaming and reflecting on how grateful she is that they followed their dream which allows her to follow her own to forge a career she is passionate about.

As Kalpana shared, ‘Don’t ask what someone needs. Ask what they dream of. What they love.’

Imperfection

This was my key takeaway from Louder Than Words. That striving for perfection in all we do is the enemy to progress. That isn’t to say that we can do the bare minimum and it’s ok, because we will build on it – music to our clients’ ears I am sure – but that if we want flawless solutions to everything we will never progress. The wider context for this was focusing mainly on impact reporting and sustainability goals and the rise of greenhushing in the wake of some very public greenwashing cases.

When it comes to our own sustainability and purpose led journeys, open dialogue and sharing imperfect progress is key to drive progress, because any progress is progress. Although transparency comes with risk, being more humble and acknowledging that this is new ground we are all treading will never be thought of negatively and will lift us all. Which leads seamlessly to my final takeaway.

Collaboration

We are lucky to work with fantastic partner agencies outside of the brilliant Wholegrain team, and in turn are part of collaborative networks within our communities – Clean Creatives, Business Declares, Better Business Network. It is through these networks of like minded people that we all learn and thrive, but it’s also pushing that collaboration forwards, beyond those that already know about us, to a wider, more diverse,  audience to continue to learn, adapt and evolve – just like the very best networks in nature. 

Ultimately, we can’t do this on our own or in isolation. Remember, together we are a rave. Together we are impactful. Together our small, single voice becomes a shout. As John Brown put it at GoodFest, when raising the ceiling we need to ensure that we are mindfully raising the floor too so we all start to rise.

So, there you have it. Just a quick summary of the key themes that stuck with me after the last few events and which have been buzzing around my head as I crunch through the leaves on lunchtime dog walks (avoiding the showers) and that I’ve already been bringing to the team. We’re off to Blue Earth Summit next week, which I am really hyped for as it’s always a font of incredible thinking and ideas, so we will be sure to share more. If you are heading over please do let us know and it would be great to catch up.

When I’m at my most positive and hopeful, I can persuade myself more easily that it doesn’t matter how I got to the situation I’m in. What matters is taking the right actions to move to the situation I want to be in.

When I first became aware of the environmental impact of digital infrastructure it sent me down a new path. One that took in learning about digital sustainability, sustainable web design and ultimately to Wholegrain Digital. It was, and still is, exciting to be involved in an emergent,dynamic and important movement.

All work in sustainability ultimately boils down to the question “how do we get from where we are to a more sustainable future”. The answers to that question can come in the form of different technologies, methodologies, mind sets, ways of doing business and many, many more.

Increasingly I’m persuaded that the stories we tell about how we make those moves to a better future are just as important as the methods we’ll use. I think a lot of sustainability has a PR problem. Some of that comes from efforts to push counter narratives from actors intent on maintaining the status quo. But I also think a strong enough, coherent story has been told about how the human race can thrive within planetary boundaries.

More gifted writers than me share this feeling. I recently finished the novel “Any Human Power” by Manda Scott.

The novel looks at everything that is wrong with the world (a laundry list of issues including politics, finance, climate change, toxic masculinity, porn, misogyny, inequality) and ponders how we might fix it. As if that’s not enough there’s some Norse mythology and spirituality thrown in for good measure. It’s like Ministry for the Future and the Thor:Love and Thunder script got merged together, but in a good way.

In the author’s note at the end of the book Manda introduces the idea of Thrutopian writing. If utopian fiction says “Isn’t it nice here?” and dystopian fiction asks “how the hell did we get here?”, thrutopian writing ponders where we are at present and what a route map to a better future might look like.

We’re writing our own thrutopian story in digital sustainability

I believe that digital sustainability is inherently thrutopian in its principles. At present the ICT sector accounts for an increasing level of global CO2 output as well as metal, mineral, land and water usage. Exactly how damaging the ICT sector is still being defined but knowledge and research is increasing.  That knowledge allows for a clearer picture of the current situation and how things can improve. We know where we are and need to tell the story of how we get there.

Look at hosting from a thrutopian point of view. At present we store and retain too much data in inefficient, fossil fuel powered centres. We want to move to a clean powered, ultra efficient system. How might we get there?

We can:

• encourage more mindful storage and data retention policies
• campaign for better digital privacy laws to reduce data retention
• holistically consider our browsing habits and digital consumption rates and ultimately reduce our time online
• prioritise renewably powered hosting provided by ethical organisations
• imagine and support new collaborations and innovations to put the heat from servers to good use

Those steps are a very simplified version but a thrutopian vision, nevertheless.

We can and should tell better stories about all elements of the internet. Wholegrain tells thrutopian stories in every pitch and proposal. We assess what a site or platform looks like now and propose people and planet friendly alternatives. Alternatives without set limitations but reimagined possibilities inline with an organisation’s goals.   

I think thrutopian stories and ideals have the potential to change minds and shift behaviours. I think the digital sustainability movement is doing amazing work and accelerating fast. But as an industry we tell far fewer stories than the websites we build and control.

I will follow up this article with a second that poses the question:

“Is the digital sustainability industry too preoccupied with optimising platforms for content and not looking carefully enough at the content itself?”

What do you think about thrutopian stories? Let me know at curiouslygreen@wholegraindigital.com.

Andy

As we wrote last week, there are some major changes coming to the way internet emissions are calculated. With improved data sources and research we now have more accurate data to work with. At Wholegrain we’ve always compared internet emissions to those from other sectors and countries and we have been busy updating them inline with the new model.  

Here are a few stats to mull over while drinking your organic, fair trade, hot beverage of choice.

The internet is hungry for power but seems to have lost some of its appetite

Based on new research, the annual energy consumption of the global internet is 1021 TWh. (1 Terawatt hour/TWh = 1 billion Kilowatt hours/KWh). This figure, used in V4 of the Sustainable Web Design Model, is down from the previous total of 1988 TWh in V3. At the same time, the amount of annual data transfer on the web has doubled to around 5.29 ZB (1 Zettabyte/ZB = 1 trillion Gigabytes/GB). Some of the changes are down to new research and access to data across the network. Put simply, the internet appears to be becoming more efficient, which is great news.

A dive into Our World in Data

Using an average global carbon intensity of 481g CO2e per KWh of electricity (source) we can calculate that the 1021TWh of electricity used by the internet equates to 491 million tonnes of CO2e (all greenhouse gases combined).

Our World In Data puts the global CO2e emissions at 37.15 billion tonnes in 2023. Based on the new calculations above, the internet is responsible for 1.32% of them. According to the previous model, internet emissions were estimated at 2.57% of global emissions, so the proportion of emissions from the net has nearly halved.  

The Internet vs the World

If the internet was a country (please don’t dwell too long on that image) it would be the 13th largest emitter between Mexico (512 million tonnes) and Brazil (483 million tonnes). Previously we’ve had the internet higher up the list. While 13th might be unlucky, it still puts the internet as a higher emitter than countries like Italy, the UK and France among many others. (Source)

The Internet vs the Aviation industry

We often compare internet emissions to those from air travel, but which is the bigger emitter based on the new data? Well, it depends on what you mean by air travel.

The internet had higher emissions than International Aviation in 2023 (423 million tonnes vs 491 million tonnes) – Source. However things are slightly more complicated than that. International Aviation is defined as flights that take off from one country and land in another. The associated emissions are not attributed to any one country and calculated separately by Our World in Data.

For a truer, if less up to date, reflection we could look at Global Aviation emissions. Based on 2021 figures global aviation emissions accounted for 2.5% of global emissions. On that basis we can extrapolate that today’s global aviation emissions remain higher than today’s internet emissions.

The Internet vs low-income nations

As a final comparison it’s worth noting how global internet emissions compare to low-income nations. Low-income nations are defined by the World Bank as countries with a gross national income (GNI) per capita of $1,135 or less in 2022. Countries in this category are broadly located in Central Africa, but also include Syria, Afghanistan and N. Korea.

Effectively richer nations’ internet usage emits more CO2e than most of the economic activity of the poorest countries in the world. A reminder once again of the inequalities faced when it comes to CO2e emissions. 

No time for complacency

While the improved efficiency across the delivery network is great news it does not allow us to be complacent. As the network improves so does demand for bandwidth and data. New AI services and data harvesting programmes are pushing big tech firms further from their energy reduction and sustainability goals. 
The average size of web pages also continues to rise. In the past ten years the average transfer size of a web page for desktops has increased by 130% to 2.6mb. Mobile pages have increased even more dramatically, by 295% to 2.3mb. (Source)

Efficient, accessible websites designed for people and the planet remain just as important as they ever were.

What does a website that doesn’t allow bot traffic look like?

I don’t know, Google couldn’t find one…

The level of bot traffic flying around the internet was brought into sharp focus for me recently when a client’s site started to consistently use more than its permitted bandwidth per month. Investigations showed that half the daily bandwidth usage came from a handful of IP addresses. The visits were to obscure parts of the site and looked programmatic in nature (i.e. not from human users). Blocking a dozen IP addresses halved the bandwidth used and all was well. The client didn’t need to upgrade their hosting package and saved money.

In spite of solving the problem, the issue nagged at me. So much of the work Wholegrain does is human centric. We focus on an organisations’ audience, their needs, their journey through a site, their behaviours and requirements. At its essence, a website is a way of solving a human problem, and/or meeting a human need.

Ideally, from a digital sustainability point of view, websites should provide these solutions while also minimising carbon emissions. Efficiency is key. At Wholegrain we spend much of our working lives minimising the environmental impact of a high number of humans visiting our sites. However, the level of emissions coming from non-human traffic hasn’t really been on the radar. Until now.

After raising the issue with peers and colleagues, a few key facts emerged: 

1. Around half of all traffic on the internet is non-human.
2.  The level of bot traffic is increasing. 
3. A significant portion of the increase comes from a rise in the number of ‘bad’ bots. 

So what is a sustainably- minded web design professional to do?

Are bots hot or not?

As a science fiction fan, I’ve seen my share of good and bad bots. For every Skynet causing nuclear Armageddon , there’s a Culture mind benevolently nudging alien races towards more ethically sound ways of life. The same goes for bots on the internet, there are good and bad (although admittedly, the bad are less intent on shaping or destroying life). 

In internet terms, a bot is a piece of software that carries out automated tasks.

‘Good’ bots carry out useful functions that help the web work better. Some, like SEO crawlers, help users find you by indexing your site’s content for web searches. Others might monitor your site for errors or downtime.

‘Bad’ bots are only useful for their creators. They carry out malicious actions in an automated manner. This could be scraping data from your site without permission, spamming your contact forms or even taking your whole site down by overwhelming it with a flood of bot driven traffic.

Without the good bots, the internet wouldn’t function in the way it does now. With them, a search for “The greatest bots in popular culture” * yields relevant results (and an afternoon’s worth of geeky nostalgia). 

While blocking all bots might seem like an ideal solution, doing this may mean that it doesn’t appear in search results at all. In researching this article, I read that Liz Truss’s website is one such site that has blocked all bot traffic. If you search for Liz Truss on a search engine, you’ll likely be served news reports on the last days of her premiership and not see any evidence of her personal website. Not ideal given how all that ended…

At Wholegrain we also use a service to monitor the ‘up-time’ of the sites we manage. If any of them are suffering an outage, the bots monitoring the sites will give us the heads up. This means issues can be resolved before too many people experience issues accessing the site.

So we do need some bots. They make the web more robust, efficient and improve the discoverability of websites. But according to Imperva’s 2024 Bad Bot Report, bad bots accounted for around a third of all web traffic in 2023 – almost double that of good bots. Overall, around 50% of traffic was human and 50% some sort of bot. There were also four months of the year when the level of bot traffic was actually higher than human traffic. I feel like I’m in The Matrix just thinking about it.

The role of AI and LLMs in bot traffic levels

Interestingly, the Imperva report above suggests that the rise of AI is driving bot traffic. It’s doing this in two ways. Firstly, Large Language Models (LLMs) are scraping the content and data they need to function using crawler type bots. I’ll return to this topic shortly as I think it’s a troubling element in all this. But not only are LLMs contributing to the level of bot traffic, they are also facilitating it.

Platforms like ChatGPT have lowered the technical expertise required to create automated programs. A couple of prompts will result in a functioning python script that facilitates site scraping. Anyone with an account can go away and take as much of your content and IP as they wish. Imperva and others suggest that this ease of access has resulted in an increase in bot traffic.

Perhaps more importantly, LLM bots are in the process of, or have already visited your site to scrape it themselves. This has huge implications for your IP and copyrighted materials. AI services like ChatGPT can mimic the content on your site and reproduce it with alarming speed. While tech CEOs would tell you this is a huge boon and time saver, I personally think it is hugely problematic.

Try this. Open ChatGPT and use the following prompts (replacing the bold text with relevant information):

1. “What can you tell me about insert name of your organisation + URL“
2. Assuming the information provided is accurate, continue with this prompt. “I would like to write an article on insert USP of your organisation in the style of your organisation“
3. Next prompt In the above please can you change any mention of my organisation for new organisation
4. Final prompt Can you turn this article into a service offering for a new organisation?

In less than five minutes, anyone can recreate a tone of voice and service offering that mimics your own. It might need a little work to make it palatable but nowhere near as much as you would need if you started from scratch. When I tried this for a few agencies and organisations I was horrified and furious with how well it worked.

What action can you take?

I think there’s a strong case for blocking bad or unwanted bot traffic from your site. It makes sense from a security point of view. It protects your content from unauthorised reproduction. It reduces the energy and emissions associated with your site without affecting the real, live humans that you actually want to reach.

The problem is that this automated blocking is pretty tricky. Discussions with our developers and the wider community raised as many questions as answers. For the unsophisticated ‘bad bots’ it’s a bit like whack-a-mole, easy but continuous. Services like Cloudflare can throw up a fairly robust firewall for blocking bots, but it’s not a 100% effective. Setting rules in your robots.txt document should work but only if the author of the bot script is happy to honour your request. Sadly, it appears that many users of ‘bad’ bots are less than honourable!

The truth is, this is something that we need to grapple with a bit longer to find a suitable, sustainable, balanced and repeatable solution. Transparency and openness when it comes to these matters is key. Hopefully this opens up discourse to help find solutions.

Is your organisation grappling with this issue? We’d love to hear your thoughts and discuss solutions.

*The correct answer (in my opinion) is Marvin the Paranoid Android.

The early days for the web were somewhat idealistic. It was a scrappy and experimental new world where people could dare to dream and create. It was a world that democratised publishing, offered unprecedented access to information, and enabled creative minds to imagine new futures. It felt like the web could lead the way to a better future – one that would be more democratic and open for all.

Skip forward 30 years and the modern web that we now inhabit is a very different place. It’s a lot more refined and technically sophisticated, but what looked like it had potential to birth a utopia has become a very glossy dystopia. Ted Gioia summed this up by contrasting a search engine in 1994 as “a community run by tech enthusiasts” to a modern search engine as “A digital app run by huge global corporations, motivated by profits and growth to spy on users, and sell their personal data and maximising ads at the expense of useful information, in a manipulative manner, while making concessions to dictators and tyrants when necessary”.

The modern web, far from representing the best of humanity, has been shaped in Silicon Valley’s own image in which users are seen as units of value to be maximised by venture capitalists with little regard for human or environmental wellbeing. It’s a world where people are under constant surveillance, bombarded with ads, manipulated to consume more, encouraged to be addicted regardless of their mental health and have their private data sold without their permission. It’s also a world that consumes so much energy that its carbon footprint has now overtaken the aviation industry and is set to keep growing.

For charities and non-profits, this presents something of a dilemma. I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of charities and non-profit organisations exist because of a genuine passion to make the world a better place, whether by helping humans or protecting animals or the environment. Digital communications are now fundamental to the fundraising, operations and missions of most charities, and yet the “best practice” approaches of the digital sector mirror the values of Silicon Valley and often contradict the values of the charity itself.

How can charities then create effective digital communications that actually align with their own values? Or to be even more ambitious, how can charities stop mimicking Silicon Valley and instead lead the way to establish best practices for a web that serves humanity? I believe that charities have an opportunity and a responsibility to help reshape the web in their own image. A humane web for a better world. 

This is a big topic that can’t be covered in a single article and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every organisation should feel empowered to develop its own unique solutions rooted in their own values and deep expertise in their field. Hopefully by doing so, new ideas will spread and cross pollinate to help sprout a better digital world. My aim in this article is to throw a few initial seeds and provide some inspiration for positive change. So where should we begin?

It all starts with people

The Internet shouldn’t be about technology and corporations. It should be about people. If we shift our perspective to look at people not as the feedstock for the corporate web but as living, breathing, unique human beings, our perspective on digital design and communications will shift quite radically. 

To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy, we should ask not what our users can do for us, but what we can do for our users. Now, I know that even the word “users” is problematic but if we reframe this as visitors or simply as human beings, we can see that our job as digital comms professionals is to create digital experiences that truly meet people’s needs, individually and collectively.

I believe that we can take some easy first steps in a better direction by looking at the following areas – privacy, mental health, privilege and the environment.

Respect privacy

It’s well known that lack of privacy has become a major issue on the modern web. The EU’s GDPR regulations and the UK “cookie law” were attempts to tackle this issue and I think it’s fair to say that most charities tried hard to comply. However, when we look at the web today, it’s clear that the spirit of these laws has been largely forgotten. Organisations, including charities, continue to harvest huge amounts of often unnecessary personal data about their web visitors and hide behind complicated, ugly and confusing cookie banners. The focus has been on keeping the organisation out of legal trouble, rather than protecting the privacy of their visitors.

If we flip this on its head and put the human beings visiting our websites at the centre of our thinking, we would question why we need so much of their personal data, and how we can ensure that they truly consent to share any data that we do need. Instead of the typical approach of tracking everything “just in case”, we can take a mindful approach of collecting the exact data we need. Furthermore, we can find ways to collect useful data without invading the privacy of the individual.

There are a number of analytics tools available today that are much more targeted than Google Analytics and that are designed with respect for privacy in mind. These tools include Plausible, Fathom, Matomo and GoSquared. Other services such as video hosting platforms often also include tracking scripts, especially YouTube, but alternatives such as Wistia and JetStream are available and are much more considerate of user privacy.

Prioritise mental health

User experience, or UX, has become one of the trendy buzz words of the web sector in recent years and at its core it is all about putting the user first. This is great news and UX best practices can teach us a lot, but we need to be careful. Many approaches that claim to put the user first are in fact aimed at controlling users rather than empowering them and this can have a negative impact on mental health.

Approaches such as creating “funnels” in user journeys to guide the user to a destination can put them on a digital conveyor belt toward a destination that they didn’t truly choose. Take it a step further, and the popular approach of making digital experiences “sticky” is really a euphemism for making them addictive. Combine these two “best practices” and we have a web that disempowers its users and degrades their mental health, even if the approaches were genuinely well intended.

The negative impact of digital technology on mental health is becoming increasingly apparent and so it’s important that we take extra care to ensure that we are designing our digital experiences to protect users and empower them to be in control. While alternative best practices are yet to be established, challenging conventional wisdom on concepts such as user funnels and stickiness can be a good starting point to imagine new possibilities.

Design for the least privileged

It should come as no surprise that those of us who work in digital communications tend to be quite privileged when it comes to access to digital technology. We have fast mobile and fibre optic internet connections, powerful computers and modern smartphones. This all helps us to do our jobs better but there is one big downside, which is that it makes it hard for us to empathise with those less privileged than us. We subconsciously use ourselves as the benchmark for good user experience and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Gerry McGovern, author of the book World Wide Waste, says that “large pages are taxes on the poor”, and he’s right. Bloated, inefficient web pages and apps unfairly penalise disadvantaged groups who don’t have the latest devices, don’t have access to unlimited data and for whom data is expensive.

To give some context, the country with the world’s fastest average internet speed is currently Lichtenstein, whose 247Mbps is 144 times faster than in Afghanistan, the country with the world’s slowest internet. Afghanistan is not alone, with many developing countries and even rural areas within developed countries experiencing slow or unreliable internet. Similarly, according to the latest Performance Inequality Gap report, the average mobile device globally is equivalent to a Nokia G100, which looks modern but is actually very slow. Furthermore, he highlights that half the world’s internet users have a device that is slower than the average device, so we need to be mindful of this.

“When we construct the digital world to the limits of the best devices, we build a less usable one for 80+% of the world’s users.”

Not to mention the financial cost of data. In our modern world of cheap data we might think this is normal everywhere, but data in many countries can be very expensive relative to local incomes. What’s more, some of the most expensive average internet costs are in some of the world’s poorest places, with 1GB of data in South Sudan costing USD$23.70 and a staggering $43.75 in Zimbabwe.

Add into the mix other forms of data poverty, such as those people who live in rural areas or trying to access data on the move, and we find that a significant proportion of the population need to access information online in less than ideal circumstances. If we design and build the web for the least privileged, we can create a faster, more reliable, more affordable and more inclusive experience for everyone.

Care for the environment

Finally, we need to think about the health of the planet that we live on. We tend to talk about digital technology using terms like “virtual” and “the cloud”, implying that it doesn’t physically exist. It’s no wonder then that we tend not to talk about the environmental impact of the internet. It’s out of sight and out of mind, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. 

Estimates for the carbon footprint of the internet and digital technology range from 2.1-3.9% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. This might not sound like much but when you consider that the aviation industry is responsible for 2.1% of global emissions, it puts things in perspective. The difference between aviation and digital is that whereas aviation consists of a few big things with visible emissions that are easy to comprehend, the internet is a complex system consisting of trillions of tiny, almost invisible things that add up to a big impact. Data centres hidden away in industrial parks, telecom networks that span the entire globe (and into space), and billions of digital devices are using electricity 24/7 and producing carbon emissions. Moreover, a staggering amount of precious raw materials is extracted every year to manufacture new digital devices, replacing older ones that are discarded far too soon. This leads to 62 billion kilograms of electronic waste annually — equivalent to the weight of more than 6,100 Eiffel Towers.

The good news is that it’s much easier to solve the environmental impact of digital technology than it is to solve aviation. When we bring sustainability into the conversation in digital design, development and communications, we find a lot of opportunities to eliminate waste and reduce the environmental impact. Taking more minimalist approaches to design and content, stripping out unnecessary code and optimising assets to reduce file sizes are simple strategies that can make a huge difference. The even better news is that everything we’ve discussed to respect people’s privacy, improve mental health and cater for the least privileged audiences will also help reduce the environmental impact. Add on top of that the relatively simple task of choosing a web host with a commitment to using renewable energy in its data centres and you’ll be making good progress on your web sustainability.

I won’t cover fine details of how to create a sustainable website in this article as we’ve got a lot of other content on that topic here on our blog, and in my book, Sustainable Web Design, but the message here is that if your organisation cares about protecting the environment then embedding sustainability thinking into your digital communications is an essential step that will have social benefits too.

Lead with your values

One of the things that I find so inspiring about charities is that they truly lead with their values and are dedicated to making the world a better place. As the digital world becomes an ever larger part of our lives, I believe that it’s now time that charities and non-profits take the lead in setting best practices for digital design, technology and communications, shaped by their values instead of following the lead of Silicon Valley.

In this article I have primarily focused on websites because I think it’s a good place to start, but this principle should apply across the board of digital comms including email newsletters, social channels, apps, software, or our use of AI.

So I encourage you to be brave. Put your values at the centre of your digital comms and push boundaries in the places that you are able to. You can help lead the way to a better web that not only meets your organisation’s needs, but also helps create a better web and a better world.

This article follows a keynote talk that I gave at the CharityComms Strategic Marketing Conference 2024 and accompanies an article on the CharityComms website about Benchmarking Website Sustainability. 

Also, if you are involved in the digital communications for a charity in the UK, we’d be very happy to send you my book, Sustainable Web Design. If you’d like a copy, simply pop your details in our book request form.

Following the recent hearings with Big Tech CEOs, how can we tell whether each innovation will serve humanity well with technological advancements moving forward at hyper speed? This was the question the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) shared their thinking on in an enlightening webinar. If you’ve got the time, I encourage you to watch the recording on the CHT YouTube channel. For anyone short on time, I’ve written up a summary of the key points from the webinar as I thought they were too good to be left in the digital wasteland!

A time of progress and peril

As Randima Fernando, the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, states right at the beginning of the webinar, we’re entering a time of progress and peril. On the one hand, we’re seeing a global decrease of poverty, but on the other hand we’re seeing increasing inequality everywhere in the world. This inequality is often created through “runaway” technology that creates a “wisdom gap”. This is the increasing divide between the complexity of the global issues such as the climate crisis, rise of misinformation, global financial risks, nuclear escalation, pandemics and much more, and our ability to make sense of these incredibly complex issues.

Thriving as a design choice

One of the key messages from the webinar was that if we truly want to design a web that serves humanity without harming the planet, we must incorporate ‘thriving’ as a central consideration in our design choices. CHT define thriving as ‘our deepest inner compass’. Thriving requires us to reflect on, set, and then act on our intentions. Since technology profoundly shapes our future, it’s crucial to envision what thriving means for our users when designing digital products and services. 

In order to build a sustainable and equitable world, we need to design technology to help users be in touch with their deepest and wisest intentions instead of using persuasive techniques to implant unwise intentions in their minds. Any technology aimed at truly serving humanity must be rooted in a profound understanding of thriving. This idea is so well aligned with the work that we’ve been doing around the humane web and also with the theme of the upcoming edition of Branch magazine – more on that here).

Dosage matters

At the end of last year, I shared an article about the importance of pacing as one of the key principles of a more humane web. So when Randima shared his thoughts on the importance of dosage, it truly resonated with me. 

His point is that technology doesn’t know how to really know and serve our intentions. What it does instead is that it uses historical data of what we’ve watched and clicked on, but these choices were manipulated in the first place through the addictive design of the technology we use everyday. Therefore, we can’t say that technology knows us better than we do ourselves. It pretends to know what we want, instead of helping us serve our true intentions. 

As a result, many of us end up in a digital zombieland where we mindlessly scroll through our feeds and watch hours and hours of videos about all sorts of things that may not always bring much value to our lives. In fact, algorithms serve our intentions so poorly that they hijack our time and attention, trying to get us to click on an ad. Here’s the thing, though. The likelihood of a user clicking an ad on Facebook, for example, and actually buying something from the advertiser is as little as 0.12% (!!!). And in return for that, we open our minds to all sorts of harm to mental health, democracy and manipulation.

Technology is NOT neutral

Some people love to say that technology is neutral and its impact depends on how we use it. But nothing in the world is neutral (except maybe for Switzerland 🙃). The way technology is engineered is rooted in how humans interact with each other. There are three key considerations that form a loop: 

1. Society shapes humans through shared values, power structures and norms
2. Humans shape technology through incentives, personal values and cognitive biases
3. Technology changes society through economic incentives, behavioural conditioning, extreme and emotionally-triggering content prioritisation and who gets heard.

So if you think about it, technology couldn’t be further from being neutral. It has all our biases and historical (dis)agreements built into its very structure and shape. Over time, the web has been engineered not to serve humanity, but to exploit our vulnerabilities for the benefit of tech companies, be it financial gain or user data accumulation.

Don’t let metrics replace values

Probably the most thought-provoking idea from the webinar was that metrics have been sneakily replacing our values. Think about it for a second. Likes on social media became a signifier of our self-worth. GDP became the value of nations across the globe. What we measure becomes what we value. But should it be this way? 

When we form our plans and strategies, we focus on metrics. We look into analytical tools to understand what is most important to and popular among our users. What did they click on, how long did they keep scrolling, where did they go next, did they come back? Did they buy something from us?? But maybe these metrics are not telling the full story. Maybe we need a second metric to help us understand the full picture. Enter: anti-KPIs.

Humane Tech Tip: Use Anti-KPIs

Product teams often lean on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as relatively simple measures of success. However, since these metrics are likely influenced by the manipulative and addictive design of technology we use, maybe we need an opposing metric. CHT recommends matching each KPI with an anti-KPI or a ‘measure of failure’. According to them, this would help us ensure that the original KPI is not improving by causing harm elsewhere. 

An example could be a very popular KPI in many companies, engagement. How many people engaged with us, with our content, with our services? An anti-KPI to that could be, for example, avoiding  spreading misinformation so that we are not breaking down reality in the name of growth. 

The bottom line is that attention-seeking technology easily hijacks our cognitive biases.

So, how can we tell whether technology will serve humanity well? 

Whether we like it or not, we all design the digital world that is a part of our lives, and we ought to take responsibility for its impact. When we go through the design process, we should ask ourselves some key questions, such as:

1. The Big Picture
   • How does the product contribute to societal well-being beyond immediate user benefits? Does it help humanity thrive?
   • Are there any long-term consequences of the product’s adoption on society as a whole?
2. Thriving
   • How does the product measure and track the wellbeing of its users?
   • Are there specific indicators or milestones that demonstrate users’ thriving as a result of using the product?
3. Values
   • What values does the product claim to centre?
   • Are the stated values of the product aligned with its actual impact and actions?
   • How do the values embedded in the product influence user behavior and decision-making?
4. Externalities and incentives
   • What are some potential unintended consequences of using the product, and how can they be mitigated?
   • How do financial incentives or market dynamics shape the product’s development and distribution?
5. Respect human nature
   • Does the product respect or harmfully exploit human nature?
   • In what ways does the product accommodate users’ natural behaviours and preferences?
   • Are there any features or design elements that exploit psychological biases or vulnerabilities?
6. Build shared understanding
   • How does the product facilitate communication and collaboration among users?
   • Are there mechanisms in place to ensure that information is effectively shared and understood among different stakeholders?
7. Fairness & justice
   • How does the product address disparities in access and usage among different demographic groups? Is anyone being left behind? 
   • What steps can be taken to ensure that the product serves all users equitably?
8. What can we improve to help people (and planet) thrive?
   • How can the product be redesigned or optimised to better align with sustainable and ethical principles?
   • Are there any specific areas where the product’s impact on people and the planet can be enhanced or minimised?

Perhaps the most important question then is not whether technology will serve humanity well, but whether we will take responsibility as humans, to ensure that we use the technology in the most ethical and humane way. 

Technology is an imperfect tool, and its service depends largely on those who wield it. We are imperfect, but as long as we act ethically and with sustainability in mind, then it’s up to us to ensure that it serves people and planet well.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly evolving technology that shows potential to offer many benefits to society but also poses potential wide ranging social and environmental risks. There are reasons to suggest that a pause on AI development and usage would be the most responsible course of action at this time, but it is clear that this is not going to happen as big tech firms race to dominate the emerging market and organisations of all types attempt to capitalise on the short term benefits offered by these new technologies.

Here at Wholegrain Digital, we aim to help purpose led organisations use design and technology to achieve their missions, while also helping create an internet that is better for people and the planet.

We therefore have a responsibility to ensure that our clients are able to continue thriving in a marketplace where their competitors are embracing new AI tools, and also to lead the way in responsible use of these new technologies.

We have therefore set out the following guidelines for use of AI within our own business and with the charities, businesses and public sector organisations that we work with, as well as for use by other organisations exploring their own approach to AI usage. These guidelines will continually evolve and we welcome input to help improve them.

First, let’s define what we mean by AI

AI technology is becoming available in the form of dedicated tools as well as increasingly being embedded into a large range of digital services, often without the end user even knowing.

At present, dedicated AI tools that are relevant to our business tend to fall into the following two categories, although tools are rapidly emerging that blend multiple approaches to analyse information, perform tasks and generate new content:

• Large Language Models (LLMs) – These are tools that are able to process and generate written language in tasks such as answering questions, generating written content or interpreting information. Some typical use cases are summarising meeting notes, creating transcriptions from audio files or helping to write documentation. Some of these tools can also work with coding languages and mathematics to understand and generate information on request.
• Generative Media – These are tools that can generate rich media on demand, such as images of a particular subject, audio (including the spoken word and music), as well as artificially generated video content. Large Language Models that generate new written content technically also fall into this category.

In the longer term we should expect these technologies to develop into Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), meaning technology that is as capable as humans in all intellectual tasks and eventually to Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), meaning more capable than the most intelligent humans on all intellectual tasks. Both of these milestones will radically change society in ways that we are unable to predict and as such these guidelines are intended for use of AI prior to these milestones being reached.

OK, now we know what we mean by AI, here are our guidelines for responsible usage in seven simple principles.

7 principles for responsible AI usage

Whenever using AI tools directly, follow these guidelines to minimise negative social and environmental impacts. Where possible, also use these guidelines in cases where AI technology is embedded into another tool such as a design software or transcription service, particularly in cases where the tool is used to help us gather human insights.

These guidelines should also be used to support clients in their own use of AI and, where appropriate, highlight cases where they may have overlooked important considerations in their own work. 

Principle 1: Mindfulness

AI tools carry social and environmental risks and so while we will not avoid them entirely, we should use them mindfully. In practice, this means considering whether the intended use case is necessary and whether the potential benefits seem to outweigh the risks. 

We will likely never have an objective measure with which to make this judgement, but the point is to pause and think about any unintended consequences and any alternative options before applying AI technology to a particular situation.

Principle 2: Human Oversight

AI tools are already highly effective at generating information that appears accurate at first glance but they are also prone to introducing false information. Therefore, any information obtained from AI tools should always be carefully checked by a human who is a subject matter expert and able to verify the accuracy of the information provided. Failure to do so increases the risk of spreading misinformation.

Note that this poses challenges for public facing uses of AI such as search tools and chatbots, which are inherently unsupervised and therefore need to be considered with extra care.

Principle 3: Screening for Bias

AI tools have bias baked into their models as a result of the way that they are trained. 

We all have conscious and subconscious biases and it’s important that our use of AI does not compound this.

Take steps to minimise the effects of bias within any AI tools used. For example, tests can be run on a new tool to screen for signs of bias before using the tool on a real project. Ideally include a diverse range of minds in analysing the outputs of any tests to help identify bias from different perspectives. 

Efforts to minimise bias will be imperfect but will help minimise any negative impacts.

Principle 4: Privacy

Data privacy relating to AI tools can be opaque and ambiguous. To minimise risks associated with this, personal data should not be entered into any AI tools unless we have documented evidence that the tool is GDPR compliant and is using the data responsibly. 

The only exception to this is where personal data is already in the public domain, such as references to public figures or historical events.

Principle 5: Transparency of Authorship

We are moving into a world where it is increasingly difficult to know whether content is created by humans or not. All content delivered by our team should be primarily authored by a human and there should always be a human who takes responsibility for the content that they deliver. 

If there is ever a case where there is a legitimate reason to publish content that is primarily AI generated, whether it be text, audio, imagery, or video, then this should be clearly highlighted for transparency.

Principle 6: Intellectual Property

Many people are becoming worried about AI copying their work and creating derivatives of it. To some extent, this problem is inherent in the way that generative AI tools are trained on large databases of existing work. However, we should aim to minimise this risk by never referencing the work of any living people (e.g. writers or artists) without their prior permission. We should provide our own creative direction to shape an output that aligns with our own vision.

Principle 7: Avoiding Fake Media

Combining the issues of privacy, transparency, and intellectual property is the possibility of a person’s likeness being used to generate artificial images. For example, artificial images that appear to be photographs of a real person. Even if we have a legitimate use case for generating such content and we publish it transparently, there is a risk that those images then get duplicated and spread elsewhere in a different context as misinformation. 

To minimise these risks, avoid generating realistic media (photos, audio, and video) based on the likeness of real individuals, present or historical.

How can we select AI tools responsibly?

It can be hard to know which AI tools to use and in which circumstances, especially when trying to assess the ethical rather than the practical considerations.

Some questions that can help you assess the ethics of using a particular AI tool are as follows:

1. Are non-AI tools or methods available to yield the same result with similar efficiency?
2. Is the tool GDPR compliant?
3. How energy efficient is it?
4. How reliable and accurate is it?
5. How will we safeguard against bias and misinformation?
6. Are there publicly known ethical concerns about the tool?

At this stage it is likely that we will not be able to find tools that have perfect answers to these questions, but at least by considering them and documenting them, we can make informed decisions.

Let’s create a culture of responsible AI use

Our hope is that these guidelines will help us to make more informed ethical decisions about where we do and don’t use AI, as well as how we use it here at Wholegrain Digital. In doing so, we hope that we can continue supporting our clients to create positive impact in the world and contribute to a culture of responsible AI use.

In addition to our own work and that of our clients, we hope that these guidelines offer some clear and practical guidance to other organisations to help them navigate the challenges of using AI responsibly. We encourage you to use these guidelines to support your own work and kindly ask that you credit us where appropriate.

As this field is rapidly evolving, we will continually update these guidelines as we learn more about the technology, it’s risks and potential solutions, so watch this space and keep checking back.