Planetary Commons is a low-carbon digital archive for Radical Ecology, an organisation dedicated to advancing environmental justice in the spaces between art, policy, and research. From 2022-3, I was commissioned to design and develop their website, envisioned as a digital 'hub' that hosts community, opportunity, and connections between geographies, bridging the physical and digital realms, and cultivating relationships between individuals and the landscapes we inhabit.
My goal was to create a digital space that wasn't about passive consumption or endless data but about gentleness, continuity, and a sense of return. A site where content doesn't disappear but instead holds and carries agency, translating across silos and transforming into a new kind of ecology.
If the internet were a nation, it would rank as the fourth-largest polluter in the world (Sustainable Web Manifesto). The average size of a web page has doubled over the past ten years (HTTP Archive). As the internet becomes more efficient, our reliance on it grows, unbounded by physical constraints on energy use. And yet, our engagement with it is often one of depletion: the doom scroll, the endless consumption of information. The internet no longer feels like a space of play, of wandering, it's no longer a garden to encounter.
What if a digital archive wasn't just a repository but a place of encounter, unpredictability, slowness?
Instead of scrolling and absorbing endless information, what if we were invited to pause, observe, and take time? Just like walking and engaging and interacting with a landscape.
- To reduce energy use, I worked with a static site structure, where every page is pre-built once rather than generated dynamically with each visit. This approach eliminated the need for dedicated servers.
- System typefaces, which load fonts from the user’s operating system, removed the necessity for custom fonts.
- Additionally, an image compression technique known as dithering was employed throughout the website, which uses fewer colours and patterns of pixels to simulate gradients, resulting in smaller, more efficient image files.