Product developers are increasingly navigating three key priorities:
How can product, technology, and design leaders balance all three, especially with the rapid pace at which business and innovation now move?
In this blog post, you’ll get practical guidance on creating products that are not only innovative but environmentally responsible. You’ll also learn why doing both is key to delivering long-term value for both users and the planet.
Beyond its inherent altruism, sustainability is a means for driving growth. Our team put sustainability on both our top design and engineering trends for 2025. Here are three good reasons why:
It’s not necessarily the technology itself that’s bad for the environment, but how businesses choose to use it. Artificial intelligence (AI) might be the best current example of this dichotomy.
On one hand, AI opens new doors for digital product design. Today, 75% of businesses use AI in at least one business function. On the other hand, AI has a direct impact on the environment: compared to the average Google search, a single ChatGPT query consumes ten times more energy.
Can an organization tap into the amazing power of generative AI like ChatGPT, while limiting the environmental impact? Certainly. The Harvard Business Review recommends greener AI choices, such as:
Organizations also have the choice as to when, where, and how they deploy resource-intensive technologies. Their discretion can pay dividends for the world.
While it’s ultimately up to businesses to sustainably source and produce their digital products, they have real business incentive to do so. Most consumers want products that are better for the environment. In fact, they’re willing to pay a nearly 10% sustainability premium. Businesses with sustainability frameworks in place are more likely to achieve breakthrough innovations.
Building sustainable products is good for business.
How businesses develop products and services won’t matter much if there are no people to develop them for, no planet to develop them on. An intergovernmental panel on climate change found, unequivocally, that the effects of climate change threaten people and the planet alike.
For people, climate change can lead to health-adverse outcomes, such as heat-related illnesses, pregnancy complications, and respiratory disease. It can disrupt the industries that people rely on every day, such as agriculture, tourism, and infrastructure. And it can threaten food security by altering crop productivity for large swaths of people.
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Eco-friendly design comes down to more than one action; it’s the accumulation of many environment-centered choices sustained over time. That goes for the design team, of course, but includes engineering, product, R&D, information technology, and others.
Designers have considerable power to make sustainable choices, even those operating in hyper growth-oriented environments. DesignLab and Sustainable UX Network offer a number of sound principles for eco-friendly UX design. Here’s a brief synthesis of both:
Across the product development lifecycle, stakeholders make many choices with environmental implications. Consider the carbon footprint of the providers integrated with a product's overall design and functionality.
For example, how does each data source, hosting provider, service, or tool consume resources? Do the providers rely on renewable energy sources to power their services? Could something more resource-efficient, such as edge computing or a content delivery network (CDN), provide a viable alternative?
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Simplistic UX design goes hand in hand with sustainable resource use. Designers can use fonts and color palettes that are more energy-efficient, for example. They can implement responsive and adaptive design frameworks. Simplified navigation cuts distractions and reduces clicks, two common culprits in inefficient resource use.
By some estimates, doomscrolling has increased TikTok’s carbon footprint to equal that of Greece. Behind this statistic is an uncomfortable truth: many digital products are built to keep users engaged, scrolling, and consuming—at all costs.
This includes:
Tipping the scale too far toward engagement exacerbates the environmental impacts we’ve already described. You may need to include video, audio, and special fonts to keep users engaged, for instance; but the increased page weight will increase resource use.
By their very nature, digital products are well-suited to help their users be more efficient and sustainable. Think about the many digital products already embedded in a person’s daily life, be it streaming media, smart home technology, or otherwise.
More generally, designers have already found effective ways to engender sustainability with their users, such as:
Automated buildings and smart homes may be the future of energy efficiency. And the teams that design these IoT solutions have more ways to enable energy efficiency than ever before.
Today, smart home systems in particular have evolved beyond smart lights and smart thermostats alone. These systems can integrate security, doors, appliances, and media into comprehensive, energy-efficient systems that react to real-time readings from sensors.
Savant, a market leader in smart and connected home solutions, offers the high-end Savant Pro product line, with robust energy-saving capabilities. Savant Pro enables control of lighting, climate, entertainment, and security—all from a single app.
Users can save energy by setting their system to turn off lights in empty rooms. They can schedule shades to close at mid-day for effortless energy efficiency. And they can create a Vacation scene to reduce power consumption when away, or even schedule an EV charger circuit to shut off in the evening when electricity is most expensive.
Read about our work with Savant.
Driving performance, scalability, and sustainability is challenging. Yet the business case for sustainability is compelling, as are the many use cases for sustainable design. The effort often begins with formalizing a sustainability framework and operationalizing sustainability principles across product development teams.
If your organization needs to answer the question of sustainable product development, Transcenda can help. Our portfolio of work reflects a commitment to sustainable product innovations. Connect with us to learn more.
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