Case Study: Ethical Designers / Ministry of Culture: Systemic Design for Sustainable Digital Services

Challenge

The French Ministry of Culture faced the challenge of developing an Audiodescription Platform that would be both useful and sustainable over time. As with many digital products, there was a risk that without proper consideration of long-term impacts, the platform could evolve in ways that created negative externalities, reduced performance, or drifted from its core purpose.

Digital services often follow a predictable pattern: they start as minimal viable products (MVPs) but gradually accumulate features to serve an expanding user base. This feature creep can lead to bloated products that consume excessive resources, become difficult to maintain, and potentially create unintended societal or environmental consequences.

Ethical Designers, an action-research organization focused on digital technology and design practices facilitated a design workshop for the team behind the Audiodescription Platform in November 2024. The workshop was designed to stimulate their vision and roadmap ahead of the portal launching in February 2025.

Similar challenges exist across other government digital services. For instance, “Cartobio,” a separate French governmental tool for auditing organic agriculture, has experienced its own sustainability challenges as the product matured and accumulated features.

Objectives

• Assess and anticipate both positive and negative externalities of the Audiodescription Platform.
• Create a framework for evaluating feature additions against their true utility and impact.
• Develop strategies to curtail potential negative impacts before they manifest.
• Integrate sustainability considerations directly into the product roadmap.
• Establish clear criteria for feature retirement to maintain product performance and focus.

Approach

• Systemic Design Workshop: Ethical Designers facilitated a two-hour workshop with the Ministry of Culture team to map all positive and negative externalities of the Audiodescription Platform. Using the Tarot Cards of Tech methodology, they created utopian and dystopian scenarios to visualize potential futures for the service before its February 2025 launch. This exercise helped the team understand the broader implications of design choices and feature decisions.
• Feature evaluation framework: for both the Audiodescription Platform and Cartobio, the teams developed criteria to evaluate features not just on user demand, but also on their sustainability impact, maintenance cost, and alignment with core objectives. This framework was applied to both new feature proposals and existing functionality.
• Strategic feature retirement and redesign: in a separate initiative, the team behind Cartobio (the organic agriculture auditing tool) applied critical thinking to existing features, evaluating their actual value against their resource consumption. They made the difficult decision to remove a graph illustrating farm conversion rates after determining that its added value did not justify its negative impact on responsiveness and accessibility. The Cartobio team also recognized that as their product scaled and offered more choices to users, the initial design patterns for filters no longer worked effectively. They redesigned these navigation elements to ensure they remained intuitive despite increasing complexity.
• Roadmap integration: based on insights from the systemic design workshop, the Audiodescription Platform team modified their feature roadmap to include specific actions to mitigate potential negative externalities. This transformed theoretical concerns into practical development priorities for the upcoming launch.

Impact

• Pre-emptive identification of potential negative externalities before product launch
• Creation of a more thoughtful, sustainability-focused product roadmap
• Development of mitigation strategies integrated into the initial development plan
• Team alignment around long-term vision and potential impacts of the platform
• Enhanced platform responsiveness by removing resource-intensive, low-value features
• Improved accessibility for all users by maintaining focus on core functionality
• Created more intuitive navigation despite increasing service complexity
• Reduced unnecessary data processing and storage by eliminating low-value features

Key Takeaways

• Early assessment is crucial: analyzing potential externalities is most effective in a product’s early stages when changes can be made with minimal disruption.
• Visualization techniques work: using methods like the Tarot Cards of Tech helps teams concretely imagine future scenarios that might otherwise remain abstract.
• Feature retirement is valuable: despite loss aversion, removing features can significantly improve overall product performance and sustainability, as shown in the Cartobio example.
• Initial designs often don’t scale: design patterns that work for an MVP may need fundamental rethinking as product offerings expand, as experienced with Cartobio’s filtering system.
• Sustainability requires continuous evaluation: creating sustainable digital services demands ongoing assessment rather than one-time decisions.
• External facilitation can add value: having an organization like Ethical Designers facilitate systemic design workshops brings specialized expertise and objective perspective to the process that can help kickstart some of these methodologies.

Future Steps

• Expand the systemic design methodology to other digital services within the French government
• Develop quantitative metrics to measure the environmental impact of feature additions and removals
• Create a standardized process for periodic feature audits across product lifecycles
• Share the framework and learnings with the broader public sector digital community
• Investigate ways to make users active participants in sustainability decisions

Conclusion

The French Ministry of Culture’s approach to the Audiodescription Platform, facilitated by Ethical Designers, demonstrates the value of considering sustainability and externalities early in the development process. Meanwhile, the Cartobio team’s willingness to retire features shows how these principles can be applied to mature products. Together, these separate but complementary examples illustrate a maturing perspective on digital product development within French government services. By incubating startups to tackle real challenges, employing systemic design tools early in the process and maintaining the discipline to evaluate features based on their true utility and impact, these teams are creating more sustainable and focused digital services. This case study illustrates that sustainability in digital products isn’t just about technical efficiency—it’s about fundamental product decisions regarding what features deserve to exist in the first place. By establishing frameworks to make these decisions more systematic and less driven by feature accumulation bias, these teams have created models for sustainable digital service development that could benefit public sector organizations globally.