Paradox of the Cloud

A promise of the cloud is that our environmental impact is lighter as we move from physical to digital products and documents. However, our production and consumption of digital content is increasing exponentially—a behavior facilitated through carefully designed experiences. To house this growing data, we are building a vast physical infrastructure that depends on non-renewable energy resources. This infrastructure comes in the form of data centers—factories of the Information Age. Similar to the massive structures of the Industrial Age, we are again choosing to build systems that use resources faster than this planet can provide. As designers, we should question our role in encouraging exponential production and consumption, and have an opportunity to create products that inherently allow users to demand a sustainable digital future.