Tim Frick on Web Sustainability and Building a Greener Digital World

In an era of rapid technological advancement, digital innovation has become synonymous with progress and profit. Yet, beneath the surface of our ever-expanding digital landscape lies an often-overlooked reality—its environmental and social costs. From the energy-intensive data centers powering our online experiences to the carbon footprint of constant content delivery, the web plays a significant role in global sustainability challenges. At DesignWhine, we’ve always believed that design isn’t just about aesthetics or usability for maximizing profits—it’s about shaping the world we want to live in. And in today’s world, that means designing for web sustainability.

To explore what this means in practice, we spoke with Tim Frick, a leading voice in web sustainability and co-chair of the W3C Sustainable Web Interest Group. Tim has been at the forefront of the movement to create a greener, more responsible internet, advocating for businesses and designers to rethink the way digital products and services are built. As the founder and president of Mightybytes, a Certified B Corporation committed to using business as a ‘force for good’, Tim has spent decades bridging the gap between technology, sustainability, and ethical business practices.

Tim’s journey into web sustainability began over a decade ago, inspired by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. He explains, “The Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSGs) were first released in September 2023 by a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) community group I co-founded with several others back in 2013. The guidelines have since gone through nine different drafts and transitioned to a W3C Interest Group, which has broader support to advance sustainability issues on the web.”

The goal is ambitious: to help teams create and manage sustainable digital products and services, heading off potential unintended social, environmental, and economic consequences.

“Their purpose is to “improve digital sustainability so that the Web works better for all people and the planet.” We were initially inspired by W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that arose from that.”

Tim has spent over 27 years guiding social enterprises, sustainable brands, and large nonprofits toward their business, marketing, and sustainability goals. Driven by a vision of using business as a force for good, Tim leads one of the first Public Benefit Corporations in Illinois, which has been a Certified B Corp since 2011. For the unversed, Certified B Corporations are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. His agency, Mightybytes, applies accessibility and sustainability principles to all digital solutions and offers training in digital sustainability and Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR).

As an author of four books on business, design, technology, and sustainability, Tim frequently speaks at conferences on sustainable design and impact measurement. Since 2013, he has co-chaired the World Wide Web Consortium’s Sustainable Web Design community group, which created the groundbreaking Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSGs).

As co-chair of the W3C Sustainable Web Interest Group, what challenges have you encountered in getting organizations to adopt the Web Sustainability Guidelines?

Tim: Our Interest Group’s aim is to help teams create and manage more sustainable digital products and services that help stakeholders reach their goals while heading off potential unintended social, environmental, and economic consequences before they occur. We have faced several hurdles since launching the guidelines.

1. Lack of Awareness: First, we need a significant global marketing push to help people within organizations around the world learn about the guidelines—and digital sustainability in general. While sustainable design practices have been around for a while now, their adoption is still nascent.
   
2. Education and Tooling: Next, there is a significant lack of resources to educate people and provide them with tools necessary to successfully adopt these practices. We need classes, certifications, conferences, and a variety of software tools, templates, and other readily available educational resources to help people fold sustainable design techniques into day-to-day product/service workflows. Compounding this challenge, there are common misconceptions that web sustainability is simply about improving performance or that it only focuses on emissions (also called the ‘carbon tunnel vision’). While these are certainly important components, this myopic thinking overlooks broader environmental, social, and economic implications of the work. 
   
3. Regulatory Guidance: Finally, legislation that includes or otherwise references these guidelines is needed to incentivize adoption in countries around the world. Find examples in the Web Sustainability Laws & Policies supplement of the WSGs. To accomplish this, we’re working to improve guideline measurability so implementation in mandatory climate disclosure reports, for example, is easy to achieve. 

For widespread adoption to occur, we need to focus on all of these things. Plus, web sustainability is a rapidly changing field of knowledge. In addition to creating the materials mentioned above, our small volunteer group also needs to maintain focus on regularly updating the guidelines as new information comes to light. It’s a lot of plates to keep spinning!

What are some success stories that have emerged from organizations adopting the Web Sustainability Guidelines?

Tim: Here are a few that we’re aware of:

1. The Lowwwcarbon Showcase includes dozens of examples of low carbon websites. While it’s hard to tell which projects specifically followed the WSGs, low carbon design is core to the guidelines. 
   
2. At Mightybytes, we’re incorporating relevant WSGs into the next version of our own web sustainability tool, Ecograder. Since Ecograder crawls about 70,000 URLs per year, this should help to increase awareness and education. 
   
3. We also know that some higher learning institutions, like Yale, DePaul University, and large companies like chip maker TSMC and Unilever have audited their digital properties for sustainability. Hopefully, moving forward, this inspires other organizations to adopt the WSGs alongside more sustainable design practices.

We definitely need case studies and success stories. If DesignWhine readers have implemented the WSGs on a project, please let us know.

Your book “Designing for Sustainability” outlines a framework that includes content findability, user experience, performance optimization, and green hosting. How do you see these elements interacting to create a holistic approach to sustainable design?

Tim: The practices described in that book—which was published in 2016—still hold true today. Digital teams should consider the entire lifecycle of their products or services through a sustainability lens. This includes the work of product managers, UX designers, web developers, content strategists, marketers, and other decision makers. 

However, since the book was published, I have evolved my thinking about more ‘holistic’ sustainable design practices. What you do to the planet, you do to the people. These things are all interdependent. 

Therefore, teams should consider the social and economic impacts of the web alongside environmental impacts. We need to embrace new ways to regenerate systems and support communities and other stakeholders versus simply ‘doing less harm’. 

In other words: 

1. Move beyond carbon tunnel vision to consider accessibility, data inequality, energy grid-aware content, ethical and more sustainable AI, mis/disinformation, algorithmic bias, and other factors that influence tech’s role in society.
   
2. Also, thoroughly understand the needs and motivations of stakeholders in a digital product or service ecosystem before, during, and after building it. Simply targeting primary users—especially with potentially problematic tools like personas—is insufficient. 
   
3. Teams also need to focus on continuous improvement. Digital products and services decay over time, increasing risk. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t have practices (or resources) in place to effectively maintain or improve them.
   
4. Finally, business and product leaders hold not only the purse strings but also the decision-making power for sustainability-related projects. We must educate them on these issues. 

By incorporating more holistic sustainability principles into their processes, designers have an important opportunity to make a collective difference for the products and services they design. A primary goal of the W3C Interest Group is to lower barriers to entry for stakeholders who want to incorporate our guidelines into existing practices.

Given the significant environmental impact of the internet, what are some actionable steps that businesses can take to reduce their digital carbon footprint without compromising revenue and profits?

Tim: In some cases, adopting the Web Sustainability Guidelines could actually reduce costs, especially in areas like website hosting or data services. Plus, faster websites that work well across a wider array of devices support happier customers. Considering this, applying the WSGs could actually improve your financial bottom line while simultaneously improving Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts as well.

And that’s really the point here: we need to rethink how we define success criteria. This includes redesigning the value we provide and how we allocate resources to achieve success. You can create the leanest, greenest digital product possible, but if it’s inaccessible, undermines privacy, or is built on extractive, exploitative growth models, we’ll never reach the holistic or regenerative version of sustainability I mentioned above. We’ll always be stuck on the destructive hamster wheel of late-stage capitalism. 

With that in mind, as with any new initiative, organizations will always be faced with potential trade-offs. For example: 

1. Where will you find partners who specialize in these services? 
2. How will you onboard and train in-house teams to implement these practices?
3. How will you govern these practices to improve resilience and maintain continuous improvement over time? 

It’s also worth noting that down the line companies might be legally required to report on all three emissions scopes, including those that come from digital products and services. Forward-thinking organizations will get ahead of this curve before legislation kicks in to reduce risk and maintain compliance. 

Finally, our W3C group created this Quick Reference Guide that includes checklists for each of the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) categories:

1. User Experience Design
2. Web Development
3. Hosting, Infrastructure, and Systems
4. Business Strategy and Product Management

Examples include:

1. Provide Useful Notifications To Improve The Visitor’s Journey
2. Create a Stakeholder-Focused Testing & Prototyping Policy
3. Rigorously Assess Third-Party Services
4. Align Technical Requirements With Sustainability Goals
5. Optimize Browser Caching
6. Enable Asynchronous Processing and Communication
7. Communicate the Ecological Impact of User Choices

You can also chart your own learning journey through the guidelines using search, tags, and  categories on the Sustainable Web Design site. 

Your agency, Mightybytes, has been a Certified B Corp since 2011. How has this certification influenced your company culture and decision-making processes regarding sustainability?

Tim: Mightybytes uses B Lab’s B Impact Assessment (BIA) as a creative toolkit to drive positive social, environmental, and economic change within our business, our industry, and the business sector overall:

1. Our business: The products, services, and programs we offer are designed to support organizational stakeholders. Impact Business Models help us achieve this while also running a profitable business.
   
2. Across the web: As co-authors of the Web Sustainability Guidelines, we’re committed to making the web more accessible, sustainable, and a better place for everyone. This includes advocacy for responsible tech legislation and educational resources we create for the web community.
   
3. The business sector: Together with our fellow B Corps, we’re creating and supporting a global Impact Economy focused on using business as a force for good in the world. We’re redefining success in business. 

For Mightybytes, the BIA motivates organizational decision-making. It also inspired us as far back as 2013 to jumpstart the industry-specific initiatives mentioned above.

As co-chair of the Sustainable Web Interest Group, what are your long-term aspirations for digital sustainability?

Tim: The legislation and regulatory guidance I mentioned above is a good start. In a perfect world, sustainable web design would just be called web design and organizations would, by default, adhere to these practices—and the eventual legislation that accompanies them.

However, there’s a major caveat. As I mentioned above, we were inspired by W3C’s accessibility efforts. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines were released in May 1999. They have informed dozens of laws and regulations around the world. This makes it illegal in many countries to produce digital products and services that can’t be accessed by people with disabilities.

Yet, according to WebAIM’s 2024 Million Report, nearly 96% of one million pages tested still have accessibility issues. If the threat of lawsuits and alienating an entire class of people—up to 20% of the population by some counts—isn’t enough to inspire product teams to simply do the right thing, what is? 

For sustainability, we don’t have the luxury of time to get it right. Climate change and ecological destruction are here now, today. People are increasingly alienated by the enshittification of online platforms they use every day. At what point do we collectively start to take all this seriously and change our practices?

Again, this is another opportunity for designers and design leadership. As advocates for people who use products and services, designers can help project stakeholders make better choices. We must fight for those who don’t have a voice when organizations make digital product and service decisions that cut corners, support environmental degradation, or otherwise alienate entire groups of people.

How do you envision the future of sustainable design evolving in the next decade? 

Tim: Designers will need to learn new skills to prepare for challenges that lie ahead. As my friend Andrew Boardman says, “The stakes to address climate change, authoritarianism, education and inequality through design are monumental.”

For example, one minute a designer might be asked to facilitate a systems mapping exercise to better understand stakeholder materiality issues during a participatory design workshop. Next, they’re adjusting the kerning on a line of type. Different design problems, different resolutions of thinking, often the same designer. This is both challenging and exciting. 

This ability to engage in big picture systems thinking while simultaneously shifting the level of detail and clarity with which you approach creative problem-solving is an incredibly valuable skill. 

To meet the challenges ahead, educational organizations should require sustainability-related design curriculum as a default. Better yet, teach these important skills alongside critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and others as a baseline in grade, middle, or high school classes. 

More importantly, companies should foster ongoing design education for entire teams (not just designers). They should provide learning opportunities related to sustainable design for anyone who wants to better understand these principles.