Sustainable UX Revolution: An Inspiring Conversation with Thorsten Jonas

In the fast-paced world of design, it’s easy to get caught up in the pursuit of the next cutting-edge trend. However, some designers are stepping back to consider the bigger picture and asking critical questions about the impact of their work. Thorsten Jonas is one such designer.

Formerly a director of UX at a design agency, Thorsten experienced a transformative burnout that led him on a journey to explore digital sustainability. His personal experience fueled a career shift toward advocating for environmentally and socially conscious design, challenging the industry to move beyond user-centricity and embrace a more holistic, responsible approach.

This is where the Sustainable UX Network (SUX) comes in. Born from a decentralized project involving over 100 designers worldwide, SUX Network is a global community founded by Thorsten with a mission to embed sustainability into the DNA of design.

Through resources, education, and advocacy, SUX empowers designers to create digital experiences that minimize environmental impact and promote social equity.

Thorsten’s journey highlights a crucial point: the digital experiences we create have real-world consequences. Every tap, scroll, and click contributes to a complex web of environmental and social impacts, often overlooked in the pursuit of seamless user experiences.

This interview delves into how we can move beyond user-centricity, raise awareness among stakeholders, and design digital products that benefit both people and the planet.

You transitioned from being a UX director to focusing solely on sustainable design. Can you share how that transformative experience influenced your current work and perspective on digital sustainability?

Thorsten: I really loved my job at the agency and I had the privilege to work on some stunning digital products with really nice customers over a long time and with a wonderful team of UX designers. Still I sometimes had the feeling that though these are great projects they do not help to make the world a better place. And sometimes I was starting to think about how UX design could be used to make the world a better place to make a positive impact. But I still kept doing my work at the agency.

In 2018 a burnout manifested and with the beginning of 2019 I was on sick leave for more than 4 months to recover from my burnout. As part of my recovery I hiked the Camino (St James Way – the classic European pilgrims way). And that was the time when I regained the confidence to go a different path of life.

After my recovery I returned to my job at the agency, but with a different mindset. In that year 2019 I gave my first talk about responsibility as a designer at a live stream of Adobe. And by the end of the year I decided to quit my job at the agency, without any Plan B, but with the freedom to see where life will take me. 

Just a few weeks later I gave my first talk about sustainability and design at a local online meetup. I also started to give talks about “Burnout as a UX designer” which lead me to give a talk at Adobe MAX in 2020. This was an important step, because at the end of that talk I announced for the first time the idea of a sustainable UX manifesto. A few month later I gave a talk at UX Copenhagen about the UX of Burnout and at the conference we did the first workshop about sustainable UX.

Later that year I announced the Sustainable UX Manifesto project at Adobe MAX 2021 and more than 100 designers from around the world joined for a decentralized project to work in more than 20 groups on how UX design are connected to sustainability and how we as designers could drive sustainability through our work.

This project was a joined effort of a handful of wonderful people. It was also an important learning that a global fully decentralized project is almost impossible manage. But this project was the origin of the SUX Network. For this project we created the SUX Slack space, that is one of the key pillars of the community, with more than 2400 members. And fun fact: one of the working groups is still meeting today.

I also learned from this project how important community is for this topic. People want to do something for a better world, but they often feel lonely and seek for allies and companions.

Today I think back then I learned to trust in the flow and sometimes to let things just go with the flow and see where it leads. Over the past years it was important for me to have the Northstar that I want to do something where I can have a positive impact on the world. But there was no exact plan what and how to do. I gave more and more talks and workshop. One thing lead to another. I met wonderful people. I met people who are my sustainability heroes.

Today my full-time job is digital sustainability. I give talks and workshops and I teach designers and teams in Sustainable UX and Digital Sustainability. In 2024 I gave more than 50 talks and workshops and in mid 2024 we launched the SUX Academy and saw more than 200 alumni of our courses.

If somebody would have told me all of that in 2019, I would not have believed that at all. And I am extremely thankful for what I am doing. 

Given your passion for mountaineering, it’s clear that your experiences in nature have significantly shaped your understanding of environmental issues. What was it about sustainable UX that captured your interest in particular as compared to broader climate activism?

Thorsten: I think one important aspect especially of UX is that we as UX designers see our empathy as an important part of our work. We try to understand the users, their problems, their needs and desires and try to fulfill them.

For a long time I thought, I am one of the good people, fighting for the users – often against the “evil“ businesses or marketing people. But, I had to learn that we are part of the problem as well. A great user experience most often creates negative impacts on other ends. Every digital product or experience we create has more actors than our users. But by default we do not look at the other actors, but only on the user.

For example: The grocery delivery app might be a great experience for the user, but who pays the price? The delivery riders who are not paid well or even only “self-employed“ (which means they’re not socially secured).

Or take the example of the great Airbnb. Airbnb for the users is paid by the people who cannot afford to live in large cities anymore, because apartment-prices go up, because landlords rather do short time renting to tourists than renting the apartments to residents. We as UX designers are part of the problem by focusing on the user only. 

But we as UX designers can also be a significant part of the solution: because we can use our techniques and our empathy too understand not only our users, but all actors in system that is surrounding the digital product we design. I am convinced that we can – and should – play a key role in making sustainability default in all product design processes. Because we can help to understand the negative impacts and also help to create ideas to tackle these.

Thereby for me it is important to see all aspects of sustainability. So not “only“ the climate catastrophe, but also the societal and also health impacts (many of the digital products we build are not good for our mental health, for example). 

I hope we can all together create a world where we use tech responsibly and for the good of all and not only a few. And I think UX design can play a key role here. 

The advocacy for a shift from user-centered design to a more environmentally and humanity-centered approach is one of the core principles of SUX. How do you think this shift can transform the way UX designers conceptualize projects?

Thorsten: We need to move away from putting our users into the center of our doing. Instead we need to see our users as part of an ecosystem that includes many actors – human and non-human. And instead of working towards fulfilling users needs only we need to balance them with the other actors.

Instead of maximum convenience for the user we should try to create a balanced system with a positive outcome for every actor in the system.

Building on the previous question, don’t you think that the direction for designing a digital product often depends on decision-makers and business stakeholders? How can UX designers raise awareness among these decision-makers about the importance of sustainability?

Thorsten: Raising awareness is still a key activity. I gave more than 40 talks last year. And I have never been in a room where the majority of the people said, “Nice talk, but we already knew everything of what you were talking about.” This is the reality. People simply do not know. Not because they do not care they just do not know.

And it’s even worse with Gen AI at the moment. Most people who are using it have no idea of the environmental impacts of AI they do not know how much more energy a ChatGPT prompt needs compared to a Google search and they also do not know under what working conditions people mine the rare raw materials for the computer chips needed for all the servers or under which conditions the data-workers in third world countries work to verify and make our AIs “safe“ to use.

We need to find the stories that make people understand. It’s a general question we should ask for every technology we use: what is the negative impact? Who pays the price for this As UX designers we are also storytellers. A user journey is nothing else than a story. And we do not need to design just sustainable user journeys, but also stories to convince colleagues, other stakeholders, customers, etc. 

And speaking about the right narratives: one problem of sustainability is that it is still mainly seen as a cost factor. But, this is not true anymore. Sustainability already is a market advantage. People want to buy sustainable products and also use sustainable services more and more and are willing to even pay more for it. Employees rather want to work for sustainable companies. And if you look at the EU for example, regulation is already happening that will force digital products to be more sustainable.

So, the truth is, Sustainability is already a business case.

You often talk about understanding design within its larger systemic context. Can you share an example from your experience where a designer took that broader view, and how it made a difference in the outcome of a project?

Thorsten: I want to give you a simple example: online shopping. We all are shopping a lot online. At the end we enter our home address and the stuff is delivered to our home door within 1-3 days usually. Super convenient. But who pays the price? Besides the impact of more and more delivery cars driving around, it’s the delivery drivers who are not paid well. 

At some online shops you can say please to not deliver to my home door but to the next hub, where I pick it up. In big cities this option is always the more sustainable, because the pick up location usually is in short walking distance. But the user  needs to choose this option actively. There are a few online shops who changed this and where the default option now is, the deliver to the next hub and where there user actively has to choose delivery to the home door.

So, by this small change, by changing the default option, by nudging the user positively we can create a system with less delivery cars, with better working conditions for drivers, etc. 

Or another example: most of the data and content we create is outdated not used anymore after a few months. But staying on active running servers (using a lot of energy and a lot of water for cooling). In one project we took a look at the lifecycle of content and then implemented a mechanism that checks once per year how many hits a certain page of a website has and if that number is less it sends the content creator an email, stating the content will be put offline, if the content creators does not intervene within a stipulated time period.

And this, by the way, is not only good for the environment (less data, less servers, less energy, less carbon emitted, less fresh water used for cooling), but also good for the business, because less servers also mean less server costs.

Educating teams about sustainable practices can be a daunting task. What have you found to be effective strategies for engaging design teams in this conversation and fostering a culture of sustainability?

Thorsten: What I learned and elaborated over the past years: It’s always about a mixture of things. 

1. Creating awareness: What are the potential negative impacts of a digital product? Ecological or societal or even for the users themselves? What is driving these? And then also give the teams tools and ideas how to create more awareness (and interest) among other stakeholders of the products. I have developed some tools, there are many other tools developed by other wonderful people from around the world. 
   
2. Start using sustainability tactics in your daily work where possible. Doesn’t matter if you are a junior or a senior strategic designer or a lead or a director. There tactics that be easily implemented in the daily work.
   
3. Make sustainability part of the goals: long-term and short term. Once you have created transparency, you can derive specific goals from it. Depending on where in the organization you are set, you might need other stakeholders to make this happen. But, if you are in a leadership role you have the direct power to add such goals to your goals and even evangelize for making it part of the company goals.
   
4. Make sustainability a default part of the whole design or even better full product building process. Beginning at the strategic part, through research, concept to UI design and prototyping 

What’s important to understand is that there is no one way to rule them all. It’s important to adapt to one’s own processes and ways of working. The good news is that there are many great tools and frameworks that you can use.

If you want to learn more about adapting sustainable UX for your personal design or your teams we offer live masterclasses at the SUX Academy for individual designers as well as teams.

As you look ahead, how do you envision the future of sustainable UX evolving? Are there any emerging trends or technologies that you think could play a pivotal role in this transformation?

Thorsten: Well, tough question. And I want to answer in two parts.

First: my personal wish of sustainable UX is that it becomes default in all design processes to consider sustainable practices. UX should move beyond design for the user only to designing for balanced systems that create the best outcome for all actors in the system. This is also the goal and the mission of the SUX Network and of many other wonderful people and organizations advocating in this field. 

Second: Because there is one technology I am thinking a lot about at the moment, but not in a helpful way. Gen AI is rolling over the planet and many people see it as the solution to many things. But we don’t discuss enough about the negative impacts of it – on all ends. Ecologically, but also societal. We need much more discussion about this.

But this also shows how we could use the tools and frameworks of Sustainable UX to go beyond design and help understanding the negative impacts of digital technology or in this case Gen AI. I have already done workshops about responsible AI using SUX tools to help people understand the potential negative impacts of certain Gen AI use cases.

For those who are just beginning to explore the world of sustainable UX, what personal advice would you give them? What are some small yet impactful actions they can take to weave sustainability into their design processes?

Thorsten: At first you could ask yourself what are the negative impacts of the digital product or experience I design. Or you could start with the more specific question: what is at least roughly the carbon footprint of the digital product or experience I work on?

From my experience over the past years for every product or project you are able to identify a few quick wins that you can easily implement. And a great way to start doing sustainable UX is the sustainable user journey mapping, since user journey mapping is well established tool that most designers and many stakeholders know.