Event overview
Green Tech South West welcomes Gerry McGovern, developer of the Top Tasks framework and author of World Wide Waste, to shine a light on how we can all consider the impact on the planet arising from our use of digital.
Drawing on his 25 years of experience in the digital industry, Gerry’s talk focusses on how digital design produces a lot of unnecessary waste and ultimately, more CO2. He explains that digital design is often an accelerator of broader wasteful habits in society and suggests ways in which we can use it to encourage better more environmentally friendly societal habits instead. These included designing products and services which create as little waste as possible when being used as well as optimising our own design processes.
About Gerry
Gerry has developed Top Tasks, an information design framework that helps identify what truly matters to people, design an information architecture and measure the ability of people to complete top tasks. It has been used by Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp, Toyota, IBM, the European Union, US, UK, Dutch, Canadian, Norwegian, and Irish government.
Also a highly regarded speaker, Gerry has spoken about designing simpler digital experiences in more than 40 countries. He has written eight books. His latest is called ‘World Wide Waste: How digital is killing the planet and what to do about it’.
You can read our short interview with Gerry ahead of his talk.
Watch the event video
To make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for, here’s the key timings in the video:
👋 02:41 – A welcome from your meet-up organisers, Ellen, Hannah and Mike with a brief overview of GTSW and what we’re about
📢 08:46 – Our famous 60 second intros – a chance for attendees to introduce themselves, ask for help and tell us about something the group might find interesting
💚 15:25 – Gerry’s talk
❓ 59:24 – Q&A session
🗓️ 01:02:00 – Round-up, other community notices and next event announcement
❓ 01:07:09 – Final round of questions.
Resources and links
One of the perks of holding events online, and having such a wonderful and engaging community, is we share a huge amount of useful resources and information throughout the event. Here’s a summary of what we unearthed.
Gerry’s slides
Browse Gerry’s slides below:
Green-Tech-Gerry-SlidesLinks and Resources
- Gerry McGovern’s website
- TEDxCAT talk
- Standing with Dr. Timnit Gebru petition
- Timnet Gebru background info
- Website Carbon Calculator
- Fit on a floppy challenge
- 1MB challenge
- Global Waste statistics
- The Restart Project
- Reuse Network
- DigiLocal CIO
- Fairphone
- Giki Zero
- Greening government: ICT and digital services strategy 2020-2025