Ben's career spans IT to telecoms and the evolving media landscape. With a foundation in IT at Logica for a decade, he transitioned to being the CTO of a pioneering music start-up at the peak of the internet revolution. His journey continued at Orange for almost another decade, where he played a pivotal role in the convergence of telecoms with the internet and spearheaded numerous media-focused initiatives.   Follow Ben on LinkedIn

Web design has rarely taken the environment into account. Over the last decade, web pages have become ten times bigger, and up to 80% of the weight of a particular webpage can be waste—content and code that is not required for the page to function. Do web designers and developers simply not care? Vitaly Friedman believes that they do care but that they need better education about accessibility, usability and sustainability. Vitaly Friedman is one of the nicest and most brilliant people I...

Manuel Vexler is the Executive Director at the Actionable Knowledge Foundational Institute (AKFI) and a Cornell Instructor and facilitator. He has a wealth of experience in leading and facilitating discussions on sustainability and digital transformation. Manuel believes that 5G doesn’t have a clear benefit and is rather a reflection of our growth-obsessed economies. www.akfi.org

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate is a postdoctoral researcher in the Fixing Futures research training group at Goethe University. As a graduate of MIT's History, Anthropology, Science, Technology & Society program, his dissertation project, "Cloud Ecologies", is an ethnography of data centers and their environmental impacts in the United States, Puerto Rico, Iceland, and Singapore.  There is a global freshwater crisis and this crisis is being accelerated by data centers’ incredible thirst for...

Pietro Jarre has a doctorate in geotechnical engineering. He’s a specialist in geotechnical and environmental issues on waste rock deposits, mining infrastructures, landfills and brownfields. Since 2015, his focus is on the environmental and social impact of digital technologies. He’s founder of Sloweb association, something I’d highly recommend checking out at slowweb.org. Pietro starts our chat by recounting his early years in mining, leading up to the Los Frailes tailings dam...

Perk Pomeyie is a Ghanaian environmental activist from Accra, who is currently the National Coordinator of the Ghana Youth Environmental Movement-a leading youth-led environment and climate advocacy and campaign group in Ghana. I started by asking Perk to tell me more about how the youth movement works. https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/ Other useful links Become a Patron of This is HCD / Become a Patron Sign up to This is HCD Newsletter / Stay up to date with This is...

People like Kaustubh Thapa give me hope. Kaustubh is finishing his PhD at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His collaborative research in Nigeria, China and Vietnam incorporates justice, equity, and sustainability for a fairer EU waste trade and a just circular economy transition. I started off by asking Kaustubh if he could give me a bit of history in relation to the European dumping of e-waste in Nigeria and other African...

Dr Melvin Vopson is a truly fascinating character and deep thinker. A physicist, he is the proposer of the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, has identified a technological singularity called the Information Catastrophe and has discovered the second law of information dynamics. Melvin is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of the world's first Information Physics Institute. His current scientific interests revolve around theoretical and experimental studies involving all...

John Booth is a well-known figure in EU data centre circles, primarily for his role as reviewer for the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres and his work with the Certified Energy Efficiency Data Centre Award.  I started by asking John if he thinks data centers are doing enough to conserve energy, water and materials in this time of crisis. I gave an example of a 2021 survey which found that 63% of data center managers thought “there is no business justification for collecting water usage...

Aluminum mining: jobs and death in rural Ireland Aluminum is a critical material for digital. Since 1970, there has been 559% increase in its mining. A typical smartphone can be 14% aluminum, while a up to 50% of a laptop can be made up of steel and aluminum.  Pat and Nuala Geoghegan are farmers from Askeaton, County Limerick. Soon after the Aughinish Alumina aluminum mining factory established itself nearby, their cattle began to get sick and die. And the Geoghegan family got sick. Their...

Thea Kleinmagd is a Circular Material Chains Innovator at Fairphone. When you are buying your next smartphone, please consider Fairphone. They make excellent, modular and repairable products that are built to last. I started our chat by asking Thea to describe the potential toxic impacts of some of the over 50 different materials found in a typical smartphone. https://www.linkedin.com/in/thea-kleinmagd/ World Wide Waste book: https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/ Gerry on...

Dr. Josh Lepawsky is fascinated by connections between geography, technological systems, and their discards. He researches waste from the manufacturing of electronics to its end of life. He explores where e-waste accumulates and who it affects. He has a keen interest in “how maintenance and repair might offer lessons for figuring out how to live well together in permanently polluted and always breaking worlds. I started our chat by asking Josh about the “pernicious myth of...

Gauthier Roussilhe has specialized in the environmental footprint of the digital sector for 5 years, and is certainly among the most knowledable people I have been lucky to chat with about these issues. He is currently doing a PhD at the RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) to explore which digital infrastructures and services are compatible with a world stabilized at +2°C. I started our chat by asking Gauthier about the electricity impact of data centers. Global figures are not...

Andy Farnell is a British computer scientist and author specialising in signals, systems and cybersecurity. His popular textbook "Designing Sound" (MIT) and pioneering research and development in audio DSP and synthesis defined the field of Procedural Audio. Consultant to leading technology companies, and visiting professor across Europe, Andy is a long-time advocate and prominent speaker on issues of digital rights, free open source software, good educational opportunities and access to...

Hannah is a freelance WordPress developer from Bristol with a background in Computer Science. Before freelance life, amongst other things, she honed her management skills at the Environment Agency, where she managed large business change projects. She’s co-founder of Green Tech South West and is on a mission to raise awareness about the environmental impact of digital tech - checkout #LetsGreenTheWeb on Twitter. She also likes dogs, plants and snow. World Wide Waste book /...

'Earth Experience Design' course with Gerry McGovern Date: February 19 2022 Where: Online Tickets: https://www.thisisdoing.com/courses/earth-experience-design-january-2022  About this episode Is technology a good thing? That was my first question I asked Dr Sharon Richardson, who is a senior scientist and lecturer in geocomputation at the University of Zurich, where she applies data-intensive methods to improve understanding of and assist in human, societal and environmental challenges....

Earth Experience Design - Online training Course with Gerry - Jan 19 2022  https://www.thisisdoing.com/courses/earth-experience-design-january-2022 About this episode Some people live their ideas. Katie Singer is one of them. She writes about the energy, extraction, toxic waste and greenhouse gases involved in manufacturing computers, telecom infrastructure, electric vehicles and other electronic technologies. Train with Gerry / https://www.thisisdoing.com/team/gerry-mcgovern Join the TiHCD...

If someone looked inside your computer or your Cloud account would they find a tidy, clean, well-maintained place? Or would they find a messy, chaotic dump. Imagine if old, waste content smelled. How smelly would your computer be?   Anneli Ohvril is founder and CEO of Let’s Do It World, the international environmental organisation that engages leaders and organisations around the globe for a waste-free world. The biggest project World Cleanup Day have engaged in involved more than 50 million...

Hear about the many digital sustainability initiatives that are happening in France from Virginie Guerin, an urban planner, who is co-founder of World CleanUp Day France. Learn about the recipe they used to get organizations and citizens involved in highly successful digital cleanup initiatives.  Virginie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/virginie-guerin-consultante-transition-ecologique-ville-durable/?originalSubdomain=fr World Wide Waste -...

Join Gerry McGovern at the Doing Design Festival on June 18 / See http://www.doingdesignfestival.com The Website Carbon Calculator is a real go to tool for me when I want to find out how much CO2 a particular web page is creating. This, and many other great initiatives, comes from Wholegrain Digital, a company founded by Vineeta and Tom Greenwood in 2007. Tom has recently published an excellent book, Sustainable Web Design, from A Book Apart. I wanted to know how Vineeta and Tom got started...

When COVID-19 hit, many governments reverted to a panic publishing approach, getting as much content up on their websites as quickly as possible. Structure, organization, testing, it all got shoved aside in the rush to publish. Sarah explains how this sort of panic publishing culture can be avoided in the future because panicking serves nobody. Sarah Richards defined the term ‘content design’ in the early days of GOV.UK, where she led the award-winning content team in the design of the UK...

Netlife is one of Norway’s digital pioneers, having focused on usability and user experience when it was not exactly fashionable. Beth Stensen, their CEO, talks to Gerry McGovern about how Netlife is on a new journey which focuses on the Earth Experience. It’s exciting and challenging times. Digital can often accelerate very bad and wasteful human behaviours. Designing digital for Earth Experience is a key challenge and opportunity.   Buy the book by Gerry McGovern -...

By 2035, it is estimated that there will be more than 2,000 zettabytes of data produced globally. Based on current storage pricing, 2,000 zettabytes would cost $58 trillion to store. The global economy is currently worth about $80 trillion. The pace and quantity of data production is not even remotely sustainable. One zettabyte—just one zettabyte—would require 20 trillion trees worth of paper to print out. There are about three trillion trees left on this planet. The digital world is...