LIFE-CENTRED & BEHAVIOURAL UX DESIGN INNOVATION CONCEPT
How might instagram use its predictive algorithm to reduce e-waste?
A life-centred UX concept exploring how digital platforms can use algorithms and behavioural design to reduce real-world impact at scale
What this project explores
Digital platforms shape far more than content and attention. They influence device lifespans, material demand, energy use, and electronic waste at global scale.
Using Instagram as a hypothetical but realistic scenario, this project reframes digital product design around responsibility for the material and ecological impacts created by algorithm-driven behaviour.
This case study applies a life-centred design approach that expands digital design across four interconnected layers:
Product & Lifecycle
Understanding digital platforms as part of a material lifecycle that includes devices, data infrastructure, energy and waste
Business Model
The incentives, revenue structures, and growth pressures that influence algorithms and material demand over time
Behaviours
How predictive algorithms guide usage intensity, attention cycles, and device upgrade behaviour, often beyond conscious user choice
Living Systems
Ecosystems and communities affected by mineral extraction, energy use, and e-waste disposal linked to digital technology
The life-centred design lens used in this project
“How might a digital platform design its algorithms and systems to actively reduce material harm and extraction at scale?”
A key shift in this project is the explicit recognition that digital systems have material and ecological consequences. Rather than treating e-waste as a distant or user-driven problem, the project grounds design decisions in the lived reality of ecosystems and communities affected by mineral extraction, energy use, and electronic waste.
Rather than treating sustainability as optimisation, the project asks a more ambitious question:
Life-centred Lifecycle Mapping
Mapping the full lifecycle of digital platforms beyond screens and software to include devices, data infrastructure, energy use, and end-of-life electronic waste.
Algorithm-aware product design
Exploring how predictive algorithms, interface patterns, and feature decisions influence device performance demands, usage intensity, and hardware turnover.
Designing for lower-impact digital behaviours
Investigating how platforms can encourage longer device lifespans, moderated usage, and reduced pressure to upgrade through system-level design choices.
Non-human impact identification
Identifying living systems and communities affected by resource extraction and e-waste disposal linked to digital technology
Giving non-human life a voice in design
Using a non-human, non-living perspective to represent e-waste, allowing materials, components, and discarded devices to “speak” about how they can be reused, remade, recovered, or safely returned to material cycles
The problems and opportunities
The rapid turnover of digital devices is driven by more than hardware innovation alone. It is reinforced by digital products designed for constant novelty, increasing intensity, and higher performance demands.
This creates several interconnected challenges:
E-waste
Accelerated device replacement and rising e-waste
Raw Material Extraction
Increased extraction of finite and often ethically problematic materials
Impacts to life
Environmental and human harm concentrated far from end users
Limited accountability
Limited accountability for digital platforms in material impact discussions
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