
World Wide Waste with Gerry McGovern
How do we design for less waste in digital? How can digital designers, developers and content professionals create a more environmentally friendly digital? One that uses less energy and creates less waste. One where reuse is at the core of thinking. One where the Earth Experience is central. Gerry McGovern will talk to designers who are pioneering green digital thinking and methods.
Latest episodes

Mar 29, 2021 • 42min
Sarah Winters 'How COVID-19 drove panic publishing'
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 government website. For me, GOV.UK is one of the shining lights when it comes to true and genuine quality web design and management. GOV.UK has shown what online government for the people, rather than for the politicians, can be like, by being functional, evidence-based, rigorously tested, clear and succinct. Sarah now runs Content Design London, a content design consultancy. Sarah is a wonderful person and a true digital pioneer.
Buy the book by Gerry McGovern - https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/
Sarah / Content Design London - https://contentdesign.london/
Upcoming online live classes with Gerry McGovern - https://www.thisisdoing.com/team/gerry-mcgovern
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Training with This is Doing

Feb 18, 2021 • 44min
Liam Nugent '99.9% of what you do is rubbish'
When Liam Nugent closed down his digital agency he accounted for all the digital stuff they had created. Each employee was generating about 100 gigabytes of data a year. When they cleaned up all this data so as to give a quality hand-off to their clients, they found that 99.9% of the 8 terabytes of data they had created was useless.
Buy the book by Gerry McGovern - https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/
Liam Nugent Twitter / https://twitter.com/liamjnugent
Upcoming online live classes with Gerry McGovern - https://www.thisisdoing.com/team/gerry-mcgovern
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Training with This is Doing

Dec 12, 2020 • 37min
Beth Stensen 'Netlife’s journey to be a Earth Experience digital consultancy'
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 - https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/
Learn more about Netlife and Beth - https://www.netlife.com/folka/beth-stensen
Upcoming online live classes with Gerry McGovern - https://www.thisisdoing.com/team/gerry-mcgovern
More from This is HCD
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Join our Slack community / https://www.thisishcd.com/community/join/
Training with This is Doing

Nov 12, 2020 • 53min
Nick Evanson 'Big Data growth is not sustainable'
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 undergoing a Big Bang of data and 90% of it is useless because we have a culture that prizes production and collection over-analysis and insight. Nick talks about how we might address the Big Data tsunami.
Buy the book by Gerry McGovern - https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/
Connect with Nick - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-e-0a0734124/
Upcoming courses with Gerry McGovern - https://www.thisisdoing.com/team/gerry-mcgovern
More from This is HCD
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Training with This is Doing

Oct 20, 2020 • 49min
Jono Alderson 'The unseen cost of poor web design'
The growth in webpage size over the years has been astounding. It is driven by a culture of delivery, a project mindset, and a feeling that the Web is this unlimited space where you can essentially do anything you want without consequences. But good web design is a complex task that many organizations are either unwilling or unable to manage professionally.
Once the initial buzz of signing off the visual design is done people want to move on. Fixing stuff is seen as a cost that the organization doesn’t have time or money for. Reframing things around quality can change the focus. Jono explores how we can think of web design through a quality lens.
https://www.jonoalderson.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonoalderson/?originalSubdomain=uk
Buy the book by Gerry McGovern - https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/

Sep 1, 2020 • 1h 8min
Jared Spool 'We will run out of things. We will run out of time.'
This episode was brought to you by https://www.thisisdoing.com - learn new skills in Design & Innovation via live online classrooms with the worlds best trainers
Climate change is not seen by most as an immediate crisis, so we don’t act with urgency. The digital world is fairly blind to what needs to be done because in digital design we don’t think deep, broad and wide enough. Jared challenges us to think longer and broader and deeper, to think more connectedly on an earth experience level. We must rise to this impending global threat because if we don’t we condemn future generations to sink in a world we—us, our generation—have wasted.
https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/
https://twitter.com/jmspool
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Aug 6, 2020 • 47min
Chris Coyier 'Easy to design, hard to use'
This episode was brought to you by ThisisDoing.com
Chris Coyier talks to Gerry McGovern about how many of the tools and resources out there make it easy for developers and designers to create bloated, heavy, energy-sapping digital designs. Chris says we need new thinking and new tools that clearly indicate when we are making design decisions that are bad for the user and bad for the planet.
https://twitter.com/chriscoyier
https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/
This is HCD Podcast Network
EthnoPod with Jay Hasbrouck
Bringing Design Closer with Gerry Scullion
ProdPod with Adrienne Tan
Getting Started in Design with Gerry Scullion
Moments of Change with Melanie Rayment
World Wide Waste with Gerry McGovern
Global Jams Podcast with Adam Lawrence and Markus Edgar Hormess
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Jul 6, 2020 • 58min
Erika Hall 'Speed: the most important factor in the customer / user experience'
This episode was brought to you by This is Doing - Design & Innovation Online Learning
In this episode, Gerry McGovern speaks with Erika Hall from Mule Design. Gerry discusses with Erika if we've ruined web design, and if we have, what do we do about it?
https://muledesign.com/speaking/erika-hall
Buy Gerry McGovern's new book 'World Wide Waste'
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This is HCD Podcast Network
EthnoPod with Jay Hasbrouck
Bringing Design Closer with Gerry Scullion
ProdPod with Adrienne Tan
Getting Started in Design with Gerry Scullion
Power of Ten with Andy Polaine
The Big Remote with Gerry Scullion and Andy Polaine
Moments of Change with Melanie Rayment
Talking Shop with Andy Polaine and Gerry Scullion
Decoding Culture with Dr. John Curran
World Wide Waste with Gerry McGovern
Global Jams Podcast with Adam Lawrence and Markus Hormess
Connect with This is HCD
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Jun 17, 2020 • 17min
Karen Peeters 'Discovering digital reliability and quality: the Toyota story'
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Welcome to World Wide Waste, a podcast about how digital is killing the planet and what to do about it. What is quality when it comes to web design, web development, web management? How do we know the customer is having a quality experience? How do we know as a web professional that we are doing a quality job? These are questions Karen Peeters, General Manager, Omni-Channel Management at Toyota Europe has been asking. I must apologise that the quality of the recording of Karen's voice is very poor. We had technical difficulties. However, the quality of the information that Karen delivers is extremely high. In fact, it is some of the most important insights that I have heard in 25 years of working in web management.
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This is HCD Podcast Network
EthnoPod with Jay Hasbrouck
Bringing Design Closer with Gerry Scullion
ProdPod with Adrienne Tan
Getting Started in Design with Gerry Scullion
Power of Ten with Andy Polaine
NEW: The Big Remote with Gerry Scullion and Andy Polaine
NEW: Moments of Change with Melanie Rayment
Talking Shop with Andy Polaine and Gerry Scullion
Decoding Culture with Dr. John Curran
NEW: World Wide Waste with Gerry McGovern
NEW: Global Jams Podcast with Adam Lawrence and Markus Hormess
Connect with This is HCD
Follow This is HCD us on Twitter
Follow This is HCD on Instagram
Sign up for our newsletter (we have lots of design giveaways!)
Join the practitioner community on This is HCD Slack Channel
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May 13, 2020 • 1h 8min
Eric Meyer 'Overcoming complexity’s invisible force'
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Welcome to World Wide Waste, a podcast about how digital is killing the planet, and what to do about it. Eric Meyer is a passionate advocate of designing for humanity, of leaving no one behind when you create your design, of thinking deeply about how things work for everyone - not simply how beautiful they look.
Links in this episode
Eric Meyer / https://meyerweb.com/
World Wide Waste book / https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/
This is HCD Podcast Network
EthnoPod with Jay Hasbrouck
Bringing Design Closer with Gerry Scullion
ProdPod with Adrienne Tan
Getting Started in Design with Gerry Scullion
Power of Ten with Andy Polaine
NEW: The Big Remote with Gerry Scullion and Andy Polaine
NEW: Moments of Change with Melanie Rayment
Talking Shop with Andy Polaine and Gerry Scullion
Decoding Culture with Dr. John Curran
NEW: World Wide Waste with Gerry McGovern
NEW: Global Jams Podcast with Adam Lawrence and Markus Hormess
Connect with This is HCD
Follow This is HCD us on Twitter
Follow This is HCD on Instagram
Sign up for our newsletter (we have lots of design giveaways!)
Join the practitioner community on This is HCD Slack Channel
Read articles on our This is HCD Network on Medium