Digital sustainability has been at the forefront of the Wove and Aad mindset for some time now. Over the past 3 years, as we’ve made our BCorp journey, our teams have learned a lot about this space. And as we have, we’ve integrated new practices into our design processes; educated our clients when possible; and regularly discussed and tracked the topic internally. Thinking about ways to reduce the environmental impact of the work we do for our clients has become somewhat of an agency obsession.

Tackling the climate emergency in meaningful ways requires real systematic change, joined up across the public and private sectors. We need enhanced education about digital environmental impact, stronger regulatory frameworks and more effective implementation of sustainable practices.

Sharing Our Journey: A Free Digital Sustainability Resource

While systemic changes take time, we wanted to take action within our industry by sharing our practical learnings, and some context around the issue, in the form of a free Digital Sustainability resource, linked here. If anything we see this resource as a starting point, something to grow and expand as we learn more about this evolving topic.

As we move onto 2025 we are keen to keep the conversation going and share our knowledge. On the site we have included a Dig Deeper section which we plan to keep populated with the latest thinking and insights from our industry and beyond. Please feel free to suggest articles or resources to include in this section as we build it out.

Also, if you have any digital sustainability tips or tricks to share, please send them our way.

Here’s to a cleaner, brighter 2025.

Wove and Aad.

Take action

If you work in design or adjacent fields, we encourage you to:
1. Share this resource within your professional network
2. Contribute your knowledge and experiences
3. Implement sustainable digital practices in your work

A note on the design and production of our Digital Sustainability site.
The site has a rating of A for its energy use. The main reasons for this are:

Font Choices: We used our brand typeface Ballinger. Although loading custom fonts can add weight, we kept it light by using only one weight throughout. And by making savings elsewhere

Imagery & Animation: Video and motion can be heavy. But we weren’t going to let that limit us creatively. Using Lottie — a web-based ultra-lightweight animation tool — we were able to incorporate motion while keeping things super light weight.

Hosting: The site is hosted with Green Geeks who run on green energy AND run carbon offsetting initiatives.

Analytics: The less metrics you track, the less emissions you generate. As such we are only tracking visitor numbers to the site, using a carbon conscious tool, Cabin Analytics.

We have a weekly meeting, every Friday lunchtime, to end our work week together. Sharing ideas we’ve been exploring and things we’ve been learning. It’s a great way to understand our individual areas of interests, plant seeds that cultivate common interests or new opportunities, and once in a while they’re so compelling that they change how we see things and become central to every project.

Mapping the digital waste problem space

Three years ago our (then) digital director Kevin Horan dropped one of those into our lives when he introduced us to Gerry McGovern and his idea of digital waste. It’s one of those very simple ideas that’s pretty much invisible and so no one really thinks about it, but when you do start thinking about it a huge cartoon weight drops out of the sky, on to your head and you’re left with crosses for eyes and birds fluttering around your very sore brain. It’s the one time I’ve seen the whole team rendered speechless and when the mind blown emoji was really, truly accurate.

So what is digital waste? Well, while we’re led to think that our digital world is environmentally clean, existing in carefree airy metaphors like ‘the cloud’, the truth is that all our digital footprints, and every digital interaction have a physical environmental weight. In some cases, a lot of weight. And while as individuals they may feel within our comfort zone in terms of CO2 emissions, as families, businesses, communities and societies it adds up shockingly quickly.

And this is where the ‘waste’ part comes in. This isn’t an idea about moving to a place where we don’t use technology, it’s about the fact that because we all think of the digital world as being environmentally clean, we really don’t consider how we use it and what the implications are, and so have been lured into habits and behaviours that unwittingly waste energy. In how we store, stream and share, in fact pretty much every part of our digital lives.

A conversation with Gerry blew our minds even further. He’s been working in and researching this area for a long time, and he shared the extent of this problem and how it weaves into every aspect of our lives. It inspired us to go deeper ourselves, and look further into where digital waste intertwines with our interactions, habits and behaviours.

Digital waste scenarios

Mapping Scenarios

We mapped out the problem space, to better understand where the ‘life challenges’ are. To make them clearer we defined 5 key scenarios that help bring things into sharper focus, so we might start doing something about them.

ATOMIC FAMILIES
Young families are big users of digital devices. Being busy, sometimes bored, everyone having different preferences, or just that they’ve never considered their digital habits. Sometimes high definition video can be streaming on every device in the house, with no one really paying attention to them. Many of the default settings are ‘as high def as possible’ and ‘stream until someone says stop’. In fairness to Netflix after a few episodes they’ll stop and prompt you to continue (still not good enough), but i’ve seen the kids switch off the TV they were streaming YouTube on and switched it on the next day to find that it’s still playing. On a switched off TV. Endlessly. And why take one or two high res pics of the kids when you can take 40 identical ones.

GADGET LOVERS
Who doesn’t love a new gadget! In particular, they’re aimed at people with disposable income, and marketed to make them feel they always need the new thing. Endless new gadgets create an even bigger environmental problem. Now on the one hand new gadgets tend to be more energy efficient in their day to day running. But they also usually throwing in a much more powerful camera and video function, bigger files, more processing power, taking up more server space. And then of course there’s the energy and resources needed to produce shiny new things. We weren’t looking into ‘e-waste’ but more gadgets, more waste, in every way. And all those rare earth materials sitting in drawers and shoe boxes because well, it’s just too much hassle to take all our data off our old gadgets and bring them to the recycling.

DIGITAL HOARDERS
Big tech has made it very easy for us to become lazy digital hoarders. Add an extra 10TB of ‘cloud’ storage for €2? Yeah, go on then. We can look at the old school hoarders navigating their newspaper stack corridors and 20 years of pizza boxes and think ‘how did it get to that?’ But digital files? Invisible! Out of sight, out of mind! In the digital world the truth is that most of us are hoarders. Emails, photos, whatsapps, google cloud, apple cloud, dropbox, all maxxed out. With stuff we don’t need and will never look at again. Folders stashed in folders stashed in folders of digital junk we just can’t bear to put in the bin.

SLACK TEAMS
People working in organisations often follow what others do without asking ‘why’ which can lead to huge digital waste issues, whether it’s endless zoom meetings, lazily sending and forwarding emails with huge attachments, or creating bloated presentations full of bad, unoptimised images (and then emailing the 100MB file to 60 people). Most businesses have a policy that all their employees should have the ‘please consider the environment before printing’ message at the end of their emails but have no real policies on their digital usage and storage.

CREATIVE HEAVYWEIGHTS
People working in design and content creation love to make things that look amazing and so create large amounts of digital waste: websites with bells and whistles and large images that don’t have any real purpose, creating content in resolutions that most people won’t benefit from, pushing unnecessary updates or saving huge working files to the cloud, just in case! Our mapping made it clear that we in the creative industries are right at the coalface of this challenge, even if that metaphor is a bit on the nose.

LSAD digital waste research

Making progress

These scenarios have helped us better understand the human side of the challenge, and helped inform our own decisions and work. They also formed the basis for a project that we’ve run for 3 years with students at Limerick School of Art and Design. Introducing them to the area, getting them to deepen their understanding of the challenges and to imagine interventions that would help start to raise awareness and shift people to better digital habits. And finally after 3 years of working behind the scenes to put digital sustainability at the heart of everything we do, we’re finalising some insights and resources which we’ll be publishing soon.

However we also need to share a final scenario. The one that we found was at the root of everything else. The systemic issue. While we can’t do anything directly to make changes on this one, we believe in people power. So while focusing efforts on the previous scenarios is only really treating the symptoms, the more people that are aware of these problems, the more chance there is of putting pressure on the source to make changes.

DATA DRACULAS
Many big tech business models are like a reverse mullet — party at the front, serious business at the back. The party — we’ve all come to enjoy a digital life that supposedly makes our real lives ‘easier’, more ‘connected’ and ‘convenient’. The business — many of the models are built on monetising the data we produce, and so they want more of it, more often, and in larger sizes. The scenarios we defined all stem from this. In fact they’re all driven by this. When they say data is the new oil, it really is, in terms of it being extracted, being valuable, and being really bad for the environment.

The Abbey Theatre’s production of Molière’s Tartuffe tells the story of a hypocrite; a fraud who infiltrates a family’s home under the guise of being a devout Christian. Under Caitríona McLaughlin’s direction, Frank McGuinness’s retelling of this 1664 dramatic comedy brings the ever-relevant themes of hypocrisy and deception into a contemporary context. We worked closely with The Abbey to design a campaign where deception was expressed in a simple and effective way.

Snippets of the design process

Throughout the design process we brought several different elements of the production into consideration:

1 – Tartuffe is a satire, full of comedy that also carries with it a serious undertone, tackling themes that are very relevant today. It was important that we balanced the comedic with the serious and conveyed the correct tone.

2 – The Abbey’s version of Tartuffe blurs the lines between old and new, integrating social media posts and techno music with baroque architecture and rhyming couplets. We needed to reflect this blend of timelines in the campaign.

3 – Designing a campaign for a theatrical production is something that brings huge opportunity for artistic expression. However the Abbey is the National Theatre of Ireland, and must reflect the needs of a modern national theatre, having a responsibility to appeal to a wide audience and reflect Ireland’s contemporary experiences. We needed to create something that was expressive while also being accessible.

We took photographs of Ryan Donaldson’s depiction of Tartuffe (photos by Finn Richards) and transformed them into graphic representations of deception and mischief

Some elements from the Tartuffe campaign

These considerations formed a vibrant, contemporary image that was flexible and adaptable, working across a myriad of platforms. From social media to massive billboards, Tartuffe’s mischievous face became recognisable across the country.

‘The Abbey’s Tartuffe was both a progressive expression of the art form and an entertaining night out for all. The brief was full of these intriguing contrasts, and our campaign image had to find the right balance.’

– Brian Heffernan, Director of aad

Tartuffe is on national tour from April 12th to May 13th.
Get tickets at abbeytheatre.ie

2023 marked 16 years of collaboration between ourselves and Dublin Dance Festival. For the second year working alongside artistic director Jazmin Chiodi, we set out to create a campaign that would take over the city and capture the dynamic, immersive, and emotional essence of the festival itself.

A brand that emulates a sense of rhythm and constant movement throughout.

This years edition featured a line up of extremely rich and diverse shows, and to reflect this, we utilised colour as a core ingredient in the identity. Working closely alongside the Dublin Dance Festival team we developed a distinct gradient to capture the tonal variety of productions involved. Employing a bold, discordant treatment of type and imagery, we created a suite of core assets that seamlessly shifted and interacted with one another — representing the constant sense of rhythm and movement throughout the festival.

We explored a variety colour palettes to develop the right tonal range that would reflect the range shows involved in the festival.

‘In this edition, our aim was to explore a wide range of tones and emotions in the programming by incorporating the concepts of light and dark. We designed it in a way that we could move around this space of colours, bringing subtle shifts in brightness to each application, while adding variation across the different applications.’

– Cat Robertson, Design Lead at aad

Around the Town

To expand the festivals immersive experience to new audiences, Jazmin and the Dublin Dance Festival team wanted the campaign to take over the city, and not to be confined to a singular location or platform. To achieve this, it was vital to maintain an overall sense of connection and visual cohesiveness between the applications. The versatile system of design assets developed meant we could invest time in creating compositions informed specifically by the diverse range of applications themselves. We moved and combined the assets in a variety of ways to best suit the different formats while still retaining the impact and cohesiveness of the brand identity, across the campaign. From large-scale city flags and expansive poster suites to dynamic motion videos, this approach also ensured that the information surrounding the festival would be accessible to all, both online and offline.

Our diverse range of applications around the streets of Dublin

Invaluable Experiences

Being given control over the roll out and ongoing management of these festival assets was a fantastic opportunity. Learning to manage the production of such a wide range of deliverables, maintain communication channels and successfully deliver on deadlines, with the support of the aad and Dublin Dance Festival teams, the experience has been invaluable. I look forward to working on many more editions of the festival to come and collaborating with the wonderful Dublin Dance Festival team in the future.

To learn more about the Dublin Dance Festival visit dublindancefestival.ie

It’s that time of year again — students in design programmes across the country are preparing to showcase the culmination of their undergraduate degree. Graduate exhibitions, or ‘grad shows’, are a wonderful celebration of the design work produced by the graduating class, their dynamic as a group of people and their shared transition into the design industry (and the wider, sometimes scary, working world).

Back in 2020, we wrote a brief that asked students at the TUS Limerick School of Art and Design to ‘rethink the degree show’. The brief asked them to think about why a graduate show is important, what the challenges and opportunities are, who they benefit and why, and where innovation could take them. Then, they could use these key findings to imagine how a graphic design communication graduate show could deliver more benefit and value to students, visitors and the wider design community.

Following the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, many graduate showcases took place online, being forced out of the traditional exhibition space. For many, their work was being showcased in a digital space for the first time. The pandemic demonstrated the need for broader, innovative strategic thinking when it comes to graduate showcases. We asked students to consider the full spectrum of what a grad show could be under the headings of experience, content, audience, engagement and resources.

This year, we collaborated again with the graduating students of Graphic Design Communication at the TUS Limerick School of Art and Design to tackle this brief. The talented group gave us plenty of food for thought around the future of graduate exhibitions. Their concepts — unique, considered, mature and meaningful, were underpinned by some key insights and values:

Many concepts focused on communicating the importance of design to the wider public, explored the designer’s role in society or ‘the real world’, and the depth of knowledge and skill demonstrated by designers that is often overlooked.The group valued each other and placed great importance on showcasing their work as individuals, but also as a group of people that have undertaken four years of study as friends, colleagues and team-mates. They were proud of their positive dynamic, and wanted to convey that they make great work, but more importantly they are great people to work with.

Many concepts conveyed the power and importance of research, design thinking and process, and elevate these alongside finished graphic design outputs. There was great emphasis on not just the work the students had done, but how and why they did it.

The group looked beyond the exhibition space and demonstrated how the grad show could have a strong presence online, in the real world and engage a wider range of people, with interesting ways of getting their work seen, heard, and understood. The group explored how their audiences could participate in the grad show through interactive displays, feedback and playful brand assets in physical and digital spaces.

This year, their graduate exhibition design approach will include audience participation, provoking statements on the importance of design and a playful spin on the visual language of the tools and processes designers use on a daily basis. Congratulations to the class of 2023, we wish them every success in their careers.

We think there’s a lot of value for design courses to take the time and opportunity to rethink their degree shows to help create more meaningful interactions with their fellow students, families and industry.

How do you think graduate exhibitions could evolve? Download our brief here, add to it and run the project!