Thorsten Jonas

Founder & Digital Sustainability Activist

SUX Network

The internet’s infrastructure emits more carbon than the airline industry and consumes billions of liters of fresh water. Digital is always physical. While we focus on user convenience, we often overlook the harm to ecosystems. In this talk, you’ll learn how to design digital experiences that consider their wider environmental impact — and why designing only for the user is no longer enough.

Thorsten is a digital Sustainability Activist, responsible AI advocate and Sustainable UX Trailblazer. He is the founder of the non-profit initiative and global community SUX Network and of the SUX Academy, co-leads the UX chapter of the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines and is the host of the SUX Podcast.

Thorsten is guiding, advising and teaching designers and product-managers as well as design- and product-teams or entire organizations in crafting sustainable, responsible and ethical digital products while using tech and AI in a responsible way. His passion for the outdoors and mountaineering drives his commitment to making sustainability and responsibility a fundamental aspect of digital design and the digital world in general.

The Sustainable UX Playbook: Design for a sustainable Future

The digital infrastructure for the internet emits more carbon than the airline industry and most countries on this planet. Our datacenters use billions of liters of fresh water for cooling. Digital is always physical.

We improve the convenience for our users, but we fail to balance it with the negative impacts on the surrounding ecosystems. By putting the user into the center of our work, we create harm on many other ends.

Tony Fry once asked: "Does what we create justify what we destroy?” Finding justice between convenience and negative impacts, between profit and greater good is one of the major challenges of the future.

I will speak about how we can set the digital experiences we create into the context of its surrounding ecosystems and how we can design and build not only for the good of our users and business stakeholders, but for a sustainable future and all actors in the system.