This interdisciplinary volume examines the environmental, social, and political consequences of digital technologies and consumption through the lens of design. It challenges narratives of digital immateriality and shows how everyday technologies rely on energy-intensive infrastructures, extractive supply chains, hidden labour, and forms of waste.

Bringing together scholars and practitioners from design theory and practice, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, political economy, and the social sciences, the book brings these perspectives into dialogue. It situates design and digital technologies within conditions of ecological instability and accelerating climate breakdown.

The volume argues that design plays a decisive role in shaping how digital technologies are imagined, normalised, and scaled. In doing so, it often conceals their material and geopolitical foundations. The book questions whether carbon-focused metrics alone are sufficient for understanding digital harm. Instead, it advances broader frameworks that address resource extraction, water use, toxicity, labour conditions, data infrastructures, and e-waste.

Across three sections, contributors examine the environmental costs of digital growth. They trace the material lives of devices and data and explore how design might operate within planetary limits. Rather than treating design solely as a problem-solving discipline, the book frames it as a critical and world-making practice. This practice is capable of revealing hidden systems and challenging extractive logics. Through theoretical reflection, case-based inquiry, and design-led propositions, the volume offers ways of rethinking digital innovation beyond growth-driven paradigms.

The book foregrounds practices of repair, sufficiency, and care. It shows how digital products, services, and experiences can be redesigned to support ecological responsibility and social justice. Ultimately, it calls for a reimagining of design that recognises its material consequences and ethical obligations. It argues for approaches grounded in sustainability, equity, and the long-term conditions that sustain human and more-than-human life.

Collectively, the introduction, opening chapter, and three sections demonstrate that addressing the environmental impacts of design and consumption requires more than technical fixes or efficiency gains. They call for a fundamental reorientation of design practice and culture. This involves reshaping how digital technologies are imagined, produced, consumed, and governed.

We’ve signed a book deal with Bloomsbury and will submit the final manuscript in October 2026. The volume is scheduled for publication in summer 2027.