Evaluating Digital Sobriety by Design: A Practical Assessment Grid for Digital Services

Digital sobriety is increasingly recognized as a key issue for sustainable digital innovation, yet practical assessment tools remain scarce at the early stages of service design. This paper proposes a qualitative evaluation grid for assessing digital services in the fuzzy front end of innovation. Conceived as a lighter upstream complement to life-cycle assessment, the grid is intended to support reflection, comparison and decision-making before more comprehensive environmental analyses are undertaken. The framework distinguishes two dimensions: consumption and production. The former includes criteria such as regenerative potential, substitution effects, induced consumption, and temperance of use, while the latter covers infrastructure optimization, software optimization, responsible data management, and AI model frugality. Using a documented Likert-type scale, the grid generates partial and overall scores and supports portfolio analysis through a four-quadrant framework. The approach is illustrated through the case of kDrive. This work-in-progress paper contributes a practical assessment instrument for addressing digital sobriety explicitly in the design, evaluation and governance of digital services.