The Philosophy of Conscious Digital Products

How Are You Today?

If you're deep in your newsfeed, then probably not that good. Economic and geopolitical crises. Crises of health and values. The climate crisis.

There's even a word for the pile-up: polycrisis, several calamities that reinforce each other. Feeling powerless is a reasonable response.

It can also be a source of motivation. We were and are product makers, and for over a decade our job has been to develop digital solutions for companies and organisations. Solutions designed to help them create and hold market success.

Through that work we've pushed back against the causes and effects of these crises, to a degree. We haven't done the maximum we can to generate a positive impact. Given the state of the world, more can and must be done.

Economics and technology are two of the most powerful levers for improving human and planetary living conditions. Our power to shape them comes from our work with clients. For that work there is only one brief: shape digital technology in the spirit of sustainable business.

The philosophy of conscious digital products is a theory of change. It moves away from extractive use of technology and exponential consumerism, towards a regenerative and responsible approach. It exists so positive change reaches our daily work instead of staying in a values deck.

How do conscious digital products work?

Conscious digital products have a character you can recognise, and five dimensions describe it.

Diagram showing the five dimensions of conscious digital products, each represented by a coloured circle.

1. Solve systemic problems

Conscious digital products solve systemic problems. Instead of focusing on the satisfaction of individual needs, they make conscious contributions to our collective wellbeing. They create individual benefit by producing value for affected stakeholders and communities.

2. Focus on the long term

Conscious digital products have a long-term nature. Instead of prioritising short-term goals, they create lasting value through conscious impact assessment. They create an immediate positive impact but not at the expense of the future, leaving a lasting sustainable heritage.

3. Promote sustainable behaviour

Conscious digital products promote sustainable behaviours. Instead of steering user behaviour primarily in the interest of their business model, they help people form conscious habits. They create profitability without exponentialism and take up only as much attention as necessary.

4. Create transparency

Instead of understanding information as pure competitive advantage, conscious digital products orient towards the business networks around them. They support conscious understanding of their purpose by others. That creates interfaces others can build on, which increases what the product is worth.

5. Include through accessibility

Conscious digital products are maximally accessible. Instead of accepting barriers, they provide conscious inclusion for all users. That expands the target group, increases what the product achieves, and makes it easier and more joyful to use.

Our Commitment

We use these characteristics as a guideline for the digital solutions we develop with our customers. It doesn't matter whether all five dimensions or only some are reflected in a product.

Every step in the right direction counts, every company can make a contribution, and every development towards a conscious digital product beats doing nothing or only thinking about it.

Change comes about in small steps. What's also clear: we no longer want to develop digital solutions that don't try to meet the demands of conscious digital products. There is simply no time for that anymore.

What are the prerequisites for developing conscious digital products?

In digital product development our industry learned long ago to move forward in incremental steps at high speed, with a focus on continuous iteration. Agility is just one of the buzzwords here.

Conscious digital products need other prerequisites on top, and we call them the DPM factors. Three things have to work together.

Diverse Teams

Conscious digital products come from diverse teams. Multi-stakeholder perspectives and contributions from diverse backgrounds make intentional and relevant digital products possible in the first place, and also get them to market faster.

Pragmatic Solutions

Conscious digital products default to pragmatic solutions. They build empathetically on a company's as-is situation and follow a realistic, measurable vision.

Meaningful Intent

Conscious digital products carry meaningful intent. They build on authentic and meaningful intentionality that distinguishes the people behind the product and thereby shapes every stage of the development process.

With this philosophy we want to raise our own work to a new level and give it a new standard. It marks a new beginning for us, although in many respects it also closes a circle.

Years ago we began our work with customers under the influence of the Lean Startup methodology, whose well-known motto is: avoid waste. That method focuses more on process efficiency than on the programmatic design mandate behind conscious digital products, but the two are closely linked.

We are not inventing a completely new wheel here, and we are not alone in our intent. The Conscious Capitalism movement launched by Whole Foods founder John Mackey advocates for companies to act ethically and in the interest of society and the environment. The Center for Humane Technology, founded by former Google employee Tristan Harris, is a powerful voice for building the digital infrastructure of daily life with mental health and collective wellbeing in mind.

Nevertheless

We still believe the philosophy of conscious digital products should have a place in the world. For people like us, digital consultants, designers, developers and product owners, it's less about theoretical discussion and big debates.

Every day we grapple with a multitude of small decisions that, taken together, shape the products we work on and eventually, even in the smallest ways, the world.

This philosophy describes in concrete terms what those decisions must contribute to from now on. It's how we manifest the practical demands on our own work with customers who want to increase their positive impact. And it's an invitation to every product maker to draw inspiration for their own work.

Because we are many.

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