Understanding the Initial Journey of UX Designers Toward Sustainable Interaction Design: A Focus on Digital Infrastructure Energy Reduction

Environmental sustainability is increasingly important, and actions on “digital sustainability” are expanding to reduce energy consumption from digital infrastructures. As many digital services today have extensive user bases, exploring sustainable design features holds significant potential for reducing environmental impact. However, further exploration of foundational research is still necessary to enable broader and more effective adoption of digital sustainability in design practice. This study focuses on understanding important considerations when encouraging more designers, especially those with limited expertise in sustainability-oriented design, to integrate sustainable practices into digital services—acknowledging that embracing unfamiliar approaches presents natural challenges. We conducted design workshops and debriefing interviews with user experience (UX) designers unfamiliar with design for sustainability to explore their early encounters with sustainable interaction design (SID) in the context of digital infrastructure energy reduction. Our study provides insight into designers’ initial perceptions and challenges with sustainable design and discusses opportunities for their broader engagement.