Good Software Design is Environmentally Friendly

Ten Principles of Good Design Redux | Part 9

This is the principle that I have taken the most liberty with. Rams’ original meaning was self evident; the manufacturing processes and materials used to realise a design should be environmentally sustainable and generally “Green”. I would agree that software should be designed in such a way that it uses hardware, and thus energy, efficiently; but I think there is a much broader application for this principle.

In a recent post I wrote about Gestalt Driven Development and Gestalt Driven Architecture. I defined Software Architecture as “the process of designing and developing software in such a way that it will remain in harmony with the significant contexts within which it is created and runs over its entire lifetime.” The “significant contexts” are ostensibly the software’s environment, and it is this environment that should be the software’s BFF.