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In early computing, the scribbled cloud icon represented ‘the unknown’ and was used as a placeholder for complexity, somewhere off the page, on someone else’s computer (see A Prehistory of the Cloud). Over time, the metaphor stuck. Today, ‘the cloud’ refers to digital storage and infrastructure, marketed as seamless and weightless. But this metaphor obscures a material reality.
The cloud is not floating; it’s grounded in enormous data centers, deep-sea cables, and largely fossil-fuelled power grids. “People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean.” The infrastructure powering the cloud is planetary in scale, fuelled by extractive systems that deplete natural and abiotic resources – contributing to rising greenhouse gas emissions.
Analogue and digital: convenient fictions
Even in our language we separate the analogue and the digital as if they were distinct, rather than deeply entangled. This isn’t just a technical oversight – it’s a cultural blind spot. When digital systems are abstracted from place, they become invisible. We lose sight of the true cost of their convenience: the emissions behind a search query or an AI prompt, the land consumed by hyperscale data centres, and the communities they displace or disadvantage.
Notably, even key actors within the climate action discourse have overlooked this entanglement. The United Nations 2024 Digital Economy Report acknowledges this, stating that they had “failed to make the connection between physical and digital; instead, they are one and the same.”
This disconnection is not new. As far back as 1950, Alan Turing, reflecting on so-called ‘discrete state’ or digital machines, admitted that “strictly speaking there are no such [discrete] machines.” Everything in the natural world, he argued, moves continuously – the digital machine is not real, but merely a ‘convenient fiction’.
Reality of the ‘convenient fiction‘
Projects like Tu Nube Seca Mi Río (Your Cloud is Drying My River) make the costs behind the so-called ‘convenient fiction’, ‘the unknown’, tangible, revealing how ‘the cloud’ drains local water, land, and energy with little return. The project looks at the impact of data centers and the physical internet and how it affects people and the environment.
Meanwhile, ballooning webpage sizes lock out nearly half the world’s poorest, who rely on mobile internet. It’s a familiar pattern, echoing the ‘telegraphic imperialism’ of the British Indian Empire, that is now replayed through cloud computing in the world’s most vulnerable regions. As UNCTAD’s Secretary-General warned “unregulated digitalization risks leaving people behind and exacerbating environmental and climate challenges.”
A history of resistance
This problem isn’t new. It recalls concerns raised across disciplines for over a century. In the late 19th century, the Arts and Crafts movement reacted against the dehumanizing effects of industrial mass production, calling instead for a return to craft, locality, and material honesty – themes we’ll revisit later in this article.
Nearly a century later, British architect Kenneth Frampton made a similar argument in “Towards a Critical Regionalism”, warning that the ambiguity of regional reformism fosters dislocation that destroys the ‘creative nucleus’: buildings stripped of climate, culture, and care. He urged designers to root their work in place through responsiveness and attunement. Frampton warns that “the bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness.”
In the same way, separating the digital and physical as if they were distinct flattens the connection between them – like a bulldozer. Without addressing the political economies behind the extractive systems that sustain the current internet, any improvements risk being commodified and absorbed into the wealth accumulation machine, perpetuating placelessness rather than overcoming it.
Placelessness in three dimensions
Placelessness on the web emerges in three ways: material, experience, and scale. Materially, its infrastructure spans continents yet remains invisible to most. Experience has flattened and become homogeneous. Research indicates that 40–50% of web content is templated. Over the past eight years, this proportion has doubled, with no sign of slowing, resulting in sites increasingly devoid of personality and ultimately value – reflecting a lack of responsibility from those who design and develop these ubiquitous website builders, templates, and content.
Finally, scale is mismatched: Enterprise-grade tools are imposed on SME websites, like overengineered office towers dropped into quiet villages. These include analytics tools that deliver excessive information, and stylesheets where just a small fraction is actually used – unnecessarily bloating sites. A better web would begin not with efficiency, but with appropriateness.
Think of that Succession scene mocking a ‘ludicrously capacious bag‘. That’s much of today’s websites: ‘monstrous’, filled with oversized images, tracking scripts, and complex JavaScript frameworks, never meant for the people they serve.
Economist Dr Ernst Friedrich Schumacher’s idea of ‘appropriate technology‘ offers a better model: technology scaled to local conditions – simple, efficient, and context-aware. Schumacher’s broader philosophy, captured in Small Is Beautiful, criticises mass production technologies as “inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person.”
Craft, technology, and environmental sensitivity
The Arts and Crafts Movement of the late 19th century was a historical response to many of the same concerns. It arose in opposition to the alienation caused by industrial mass production, a process strikingly similar to today’s standardized web development and the resulting death of the webmaster. Figures like William Morris argued that design should not be divorced from context, material, or meaning.
In California, architects Charles and Henry Greene brought these ideals into built form, using locally sourced wood and stone to create homes that harmonized with their environment featuring shaded porches, open courtyards, and low, broad roofs tuned to the California climate. They believed the style of a house should be determined by four conditions: “climate, environment, materials available, and habits and tastes – i.e. life of the owner”. Their houses, such as the Gamble House, were not just structures but situated experiences and attuned to weather, light, and the rhythms of place. This was not merely aesthetic, but ideological: a form of resistance against placeless, decontextualized architecture. Frampton describes this kind of interaction between nature and culture as the ‘place-conscious-poetic.’
Across the Atlantic, a similar ethos took shape in Cragside, the Northumberland home of hydroelectricity inventor William Armstrong. Often considered an early Arts and Crafts exemplar, Cragside was the first house in the world powered by hydroelectricity. Here, technological innovation was not in opposition to nature but embedded within it – an early model of sustainable, site-specific design. Armstrong’s vision fused engineering with environmental sensitivity, showing that craft and technology need not be at odds. In fact, the Arts and Crafts tradition has long been connected to figures central to technological progress – not to reject the future, but to shape it more thoughtfully.
Research by Burman and Sinclair highlights how the Arts and Crafts Movement embodies a holistic sustainability framework grounded in place-making. Their work stresses that sustainability is not merely about materials or energy but involves intertwined environmental, social, and economic conditions. They argue that true place-making emerges from sensitivity to nature, vernacular traditions, craft techniques, and local materials – all combined with a deep respect for the community and its cultural context. This approach resists generic, one-size-fits-all solutions and instead champions proportional, place-conscious design that responds organically to their environment and those who use it.
A truly crafted design responds organically to its environment and those who use it. Even in their own time, figures like Morris, the Greenes, and Armstrong grappled with challenges still familiar today: disproportionate systems, homogenous design, and the disconnection between technologies and the lives they shape. The Arts and Crafts Movement was never just about craft; it was about care, context, and resistance to placelessness. As Burman and Sinclair argue, its values are not nostalgic but offer a practical framework for sustainable, situated design.
Similarly, as Frampton warned of placeless modernism, today’s digital templates risk erasing the ‘creative nucleus.’ While templates and no-code website builders lower barriers and increase accessibility, their proliferation – driven by a mindset prioritizing uniformity, optimization, and increasingly shaped by AI learning from existing patterns – threatens to strip away personality and value. Yet with the right principles, the web can be more than usable – it can be inhabitable. This ethos translates powerfully online: What does it mean to design with place in digital space and create something with ‘place-conscious poetics’?
Digital craft and the rhythms of place
We’re already familiar with the web adapting in simple ways: early M(Dot) mobile specific websites, or Google Doodles celebrating local holidays. But place-conscious design can go deeper. Just as houses respond to their environment with wide eaves or shaded courtyards, imagine websites served from edge servers that adjust content quality based on the local renewable energy mix, delivering rich experiences when the grid is low-intensity, scaling back during fossil-fuel-heavy periods.
This represents a new kind of web – one that is not only aware of location but conscious of how our digital footprint affects the planet in real time. Built as a static site with no unnecessary frameworks, everything is deliberately proportionate and handcrafted in long form, embracing the ethos of digital craft. Jon Rogers’ hiCraft project draws on Tim Ingold’s concept of making as a morphogenetic process, where materials are active participants and the maker ‘joins forces with them’ rather than exercizing control. This attunement shapes technology not only in form but also in method, infusing it with locality and narrative, emphasizing deliberateness, responsiveness, and respect for the environment in which it exists.
Toward a place-conscious web
A place-conscious website, as defined by Frampton, balances nature and culture to create what Greene and Greene describe as a ‘situated experience.’ To overcome ‘placelessness’ – which manifests on the web as material, experience, and scale – website design must begin with the appropriateness of material and scale: understanding the user and their context, setting constraints such as a ’page weight budget’, and carefully selecting a tech stack – the digital equivalent of building materials – that aligns with the site’s purpose and environment, rather than imposing unnecessary complexity.
This requires skills beyond traditional development and user experience, including empathetic user research, thoughtful content curation and creation, and mindful performance optimization. It means choosing lighter, more relevant tools and services, such as Cabin Analytics for small businesses, or opting for static sites (e.g. Sunday Sites) instead of CMS-heavy builders when updates are infrequent. Simplifying site architecture and reducing reliance on bulky libraries can foster websites that feel rooted and attuned. Practical methods also include integrating live environmental data – energy grid intensity, real-time weather, or local air quality data – to dynamically adapt a site’s appearance or behavior.
Our Overbrowsing Research Group website embodies these principles: It’s a static site that avoids unnecessary frameworks and bloat, dynamically shifting its appearance and color based on air pollution levels and time of day. It also incorporates a grid-aware feature, inspired by Branch, that adapts functionality according to local energy demand.
Grounding the cloud
Finally, the goal isn’t nostalgia or retreat. A ‘place-conscious poetic’ web doesn’t mean rejecting scale or technological progress – it means alignment. It asks that we move from the abstraction of ‘convenient fiction’ toward awareness. It means designing systems that are proportionate, responsive, and just. That are conscious that all computing happens somewhere – and that somewhere matters.
Designing in this way may also help counter the psychological dissociation common in digital experiences. A web rooted in context might feel different, more embodied, more local, more aware. The cloud, in the end, is not above us. It is grounded, in material, in labour, in limits. But also, in possibility. To build a better internet, we must bring it back down to earth.
David Mahoney is a PhD candidate at The University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Design Informatics. His principal research interest is reducing the environmental impact of the internet and improving accessibility, aligning technological potential with environmental stewardship. He is the founder of Overbrowsing, an applied research group focused on advancing sustainable web practices.