The real cost of "cheap."

On 20 March 2026, Design Declares hosted its second discipline-specific event at ustwo's Shoreditch offices. The focus this time… digital design. Not the theory of it. The practice. The tensions. The bits that don't fit neatly into a slide deck.

Four speakers. Four different angles on the same question… how do we build digital experiences that respect both creative ambition and the planet?

Here's what came out of the room.

Thorsten Jonas, SUX Network… "The price is just paid somewhere else"

Thorsten opened with the kind of LinkedIn post we've all seen. "I built a team of agents that took over the full design process… and it is so cheap."

His response was blunt. No, it's not.

He walked through the environmental cost of AI that rarely makes the pitch deck. Around 231 ChatGPT queries produce 1kg of CO₂. Every kilogram of CO₂ costs roughly 15 kilograms of glacier ice. The maths isn't complicated. It's just inconvenient.

That said, his talk went beyond carbon. He showed how bias compounds when automation removes the human from the loop… prompting Midjourney with "basketball player" returns overwhelmingly Black men, while "depressed person" returns almost entirely women. These aren't edge cases. They're the default outputs of a system trained on the past.

And on creativity? Thorsten prompted an AI image generator with "Italian video game." It produced four variations of Super Mario. Not a new concept. A reproduction of the strongest signal in the dataset. Gen AI is pretty good at recombining. It's not good at creating something substantially new. Strong signals prevail. Weak signals vanish.

His framing landed. AI isn't a god-given reality. It's a narrative built by big tech. And it's our decision whether to follow those narratives or set better ones.

Kenny Heard, Driftime®… the missing middle

Kenny's talk started with a tension anyone building for the web will recognise. Better tools. Heavier websites. The average web page has nearly tripled in size over the last decade, even as our tooling has become more efficient. A textbook Jevons paradox playing out in real time.

Most teams discover the environmental cost of their decisions after the build, not before it. That's the gap Kenny's work at Driftime is trying to close… what he called "the missing middle." We have frameworks and principles on one side. We have measurement and monitoring tools on the other. What's absent is planning… the ability to understand the environmental cost of design decisions before they're locked in.

His proposed tool? Carbon budgets for web projects. A way to allocate environmental cost across fonts, hosting, scripts, motion, images, and video before a single line of code is written. The balance between expression and efficiency looks different every time, because the context is different every time. A cultural institution's homepage has different needs to a climate finance tracker.

The line that stuck. Sustainability isn't a trade-off. It's a signal that tells you whether your process is intentional.

Scott Stonham, Digital Carbon Online… two sides of the same coin

Scott framed digital sustainability as a coin with two faces. Using technology to achieve sustainability goals on one side, and applying sustainability practices to the technology itself on the other. Both matter. Most conversations only cover one.

He brought hard data from the Cultural Website Sustainability Benchmark Report, showing how video content on high-traffic pages drives enormous cumulative carbon output. His proposal was practical… shift rich media to engagement-focused pages where fewer visitors see it but the content drives better conversion. The result? Lower overall CO₂ with better outcomes. Not a sacrifice. A smarter allocation.

His case study on National Museums Scotland was particularly compelling. A UX redesign brought the worst-performing pages from over 1.78g CO₂ per view down to 0.63g, and the median from 0.5g to 0.12g. That's a 72% monthly carbon reduction through content, platform, and UX optimisation alone.

Small digital habit changes that add up. Links instead of attachments. Turning off what you're not using. Reusing and refurbishing hardware. None of this is glamorous. All of it scales.

Sandrine Herbert-Razafinjato, The Responsible Design Studio… navigating tensions with action cards

Sandrine brought something tangible to the room. Using the Design Declares action cards (52 cards organised around a sphere of action framework), she helped attendees navigate the very tensions the other speakers had named.

Her focus was on the practical reality of establishing sustainability within large product teams, where the constraints are real and the politics are messy. A few of her provocations landed particularly well.

"Cultivate FOMO." Not the anxious kind. The kind that makes sustainable practice feel like something your team is missing out on rather than something being imposed on them. Frame it as opportunity. Make people want in.

"Don't keep mentioning the planet." Know your audience. Speak their language. Sometimes embedding systemic and sustainable thinking into conversations about efficiency, cost, reliability, and social benefit gets further than leading with environmental messaging. It sounds counterintuitive. It works.

From talks to tables… the workshop

After the speakers stepped down, the room got to work.

Using the Design Declares action cards and a structured workbook, attendees broke into groups to tackle climate challenges through the lens of design practice. The session was built around two core exercises.

First, the Sphere of Action. Rather than trying to change everything at once, groups mapped their chosen challenge across three layers… what they could directly control, what they could influence, and what they could advocate for. It's a framework that stops ambition from becoming paralysis. You can't fix the entire supply chain of a digital product from your desk. But you can control your image optimisation pipeline. You can influence your team's approach to video on high-traffic pages. You can advocate for carbon budgets in your organisation's procurement process.

Then came the milestone exercise. Big, abstract goals got broken into sequenced, achievable steps. Not a five-year plan. Something closer to "what could you do in the next sprint, the next quarter, the next project?" The shift from aspiration to action felt tangible in the room. Groups weren't just discussing sustainability. They were planning it.

What made the workshop land was the combination. The talks had named the tensions. The cards and workbook gave people a structure to sit inside those tensions and start moving. Not perfectly. Not with all the answers. But with a clear first step and the confidence that the step was worth taking.

What stayed in the room

The evening wasn't about consensus. It was about sitting with complexity… the kind that doesn't resolve into a three-step framework or a single metric.

What connected all four talks was a shared insistence on intentionality. Whether that's questioning the true cost of an AI agent, budgeting carbon before a build starts, shifting video to smarter places, or reframing sustainability as something people want to be part of.

The work goes on. And honestly, hearing these four perspectives in the same room made it feel a little more possible.

What's the one tension in your own digital practice you've been avoiding?

Massive thanks to our speakers Thorsten Jonas, Kenny Heard, Scott Stonham, and Sandrine Herbert-Razafinjato for bringing such honest, grounded perspectives to the room. And to the Design Declares volunteers who made the whole evening happen… Olivia Dias Bagott, Sruti Gidugu, Alice Stauss, Kavya Narayanan, Marina Stavrinides, Oliver Lloyd, and Sandrine (who somehow managed to both speak and volunteer). None of this works without the folks willing to show up early and stay late.

A huge thank you to ustwo and Pablo Rizzi for hosting us in their beautiful Shoreditch space. The generosity made a real difference.

Event summary by Abb-d Taiyo, host for the evening and Co-steer of D! UK