Digital sustainability & Aer Studios

Our Head of Technology, James, made his way back to Denmark as part of his volunteering efforts with open-source CMS, Umbraco.

After delivering a talk on AI and sustainability at Codegarden in June, I nipped back to Denmark last week to spend some time with the merry band of volunteers from the digital industry that make up the Umbraco Community Sustainability Team.

There are some new faces on the team - you can meet them here - along with some old ones, but our mission remains the same: lend our expertise to help reduce the carbon emissions of Umbraco, and raise awareness of digital sustainability generally!

Why are you doing this?

Our mission at aer studios is to deliver meaningful digital experiences that have a positive impact on people and planet.

Umbraco is an open-source CMS. We all benefit from open-source software, and contributing my time to initiatives like this is a way of giving back. It’s also rather important to move towards a more sustainable world to avoid a hellish future, AND there is a positive association between sustainable digital technology and better commercial outcomes!

I also get to work with a bunch of really interesting people with a range of experience when it comes to this stuff, and bring it back to aer studios and our clients.

Everybody wins.

What is the visit?

Umbraco HQ is based in the lovely city of Odense, Denmark, and once a year HQ brings all the Community Team volunteers together for 2 days of planning, collaboration and team building.

Normally we get together once a month online, so being able to work together in person is really valuable.

What were the highlights of this year?

Outside of the usual activities you’d expect (reviewing last year’s work, prioritising initiatives and working on them), a theme of previous years is understanding what other organisations do in the sustainability space, outside of the digital industry.

This year, we visited Kompan, a global manufacturer of children’s playground equipment.

They’re doing quite remarkable things in the sustainability space, including manufacturing significant chunks of their products with up to 95% post-consumer recycled materials. We got ‘hands on’ with some incredibly strong materials made from plastic bags and thrown-away clothes - really remarkable.

How is this applicable to digital sustainability? It’s not. What is relevant, though, is how they have gone about a) making this a priority for their business and b) communicating the work they’ve been doing.

A real challenge with digital sustainability is making people care enough about it to act, and we had some really interesting discussions with them on how they’ve approached that. Interestingly, their team did not realise that websites / digital have a carbon impact - so everybody learnt something!

We’re big fans of this kind of cross-pollination of learning and information at aer - partly because we’re curious people, but also because our clients benefit from the wide range of organisations we work with. Even a children' s playground company, in this case, has some interesting approaches to communicating clearly that we can learn from.

What’s next?

We’ll continue having our monthly online get togethers, and we now again have a long list of things we want to achieve as a team over the next 12 months - ultimately working towards our goal of lowering carbon emissions.

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about digital sustainability and why it’s so important, please get in touch with us.