Ethical Design: what is the value of ethics in design?
“Design needs ethics”. This is stated by service designer Jet Gispen [1], arguing that design has a huge influence on people’s daily lives and the way they behave. For Gispen, there is no neutral design, which is an intrinsically ethical activity.
What is ethical design?
According to Encyclopedia.com [2], we can define ethical design as follows:
Ethical design is concerned with moral behaviour and responsible choices in design practice. It serves as a guide for designers in how they should work with clients, colleagues and end users of products, how they should conduct the design process, how they should determine product characteristics and how they should assess the ethical or moral significance of the products that result from design activity.
The design and the designer
As designers, we are trained to solve problems and improve people’s lives. However, the experiences we design are mostly a reflection of our own ethical and cultural heritage. We rarely stop to think about what the word ‘improve’ really means for those who will use the product, service or experience we are designing.
Mike Monteiro, co-founder and design director of Mule Design, listed some principles that illustrate the impact designers have on the context around them [3]. Because designers are human and are responsible for what they create.
Like Jet Gispen, Monteiro argues that design does not exist in a vacuum and, therefore, we need to be aware of the consequences of our work and not be guided only by the brilliance of our ideas.
Gispen starts from the result (the design), Monteiro starts from the creator (the designer), but the message about the value of ethics in design comes in unison: design and the designer, intrinsically linked, have a responsibility that goes beyond the simple aesthetic sense of form and function.
Monteiro points out that, ultimately, designers are responsible for the harm their work may cause in the lives of those impacted by it.
But are designers the only variable in this equation?
Technology and multidisciplinary teams
Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, makes it clear through InVision’s documentary “Squads” [4] that after the 1990s, it became indispensable to have teams working on the product, rather than a single person, to make things work. In today’s complex technological ecosystem, these teams tend to be multidisciplinary, and seek to be increasingly effective, agile and innovative in the solutions they create.
And like design, the technology that powers this ecosystem is not neutral. Its social, political and moral impacts are becoming increasingly clear, whether through the disruptive power of persuasive technology, or the lack of transparency in data collection and processing, or even the development of technologies with biased behavioural patterns (in cases like Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning).
According to Cennydd Bowles, designer and author of the book “Future Ethics” [5], the risks of these impacts will increase as technology becomes increasingly algorithmic and automated. But the tech industry has yet to earn the trust that these technologies require.
Curt Arledge, researcher and designer, asks the question: what is the role of designers when we talk about ethical design? [7]
The focus areas of ethical design
In “Daily Ethical Design” [6], Lennart Overkamp, interaction and service designer, tells us that it is not easy to dub a design as “ethical” or “unethical”, but lists the various areas on which designers should consider the use of ethics: usability, accessibility, privacy, user engagement, persuasion, focus, sustainability, society.
Overkamp sets out each of these points in a simple and concrete way, helping us to understand what we should consider, and what our real impact can be, in each of these areas of action.
But there are challenges. If, on the one hand, most of the focus areas of ethics are quite tangible, where design decisions have immediate effects, often visible and relatively easy to integrate into our daily work, on the other hand, areas such as ‘society’ or ‘sustainability’, can be more difficult to understand, or are more intangible topics, where the effects of our work can be distant and uncertain.
Overkamp ends the article [6] by warning that just having the intention to do good will not be enough. As professionals, we will have to regularly and systematically take a step back and consider the future impact of our work.
The limits of ethical design(er)
In “Design Ethics and the Limits of the Ethical Designer” [7], we quickly identify another panoply of challenges and impediments, which the designer will have to understand how to overcome, in order to have an active voice in the moral and ethical sphere of the products he or she helps to build.
According to Arledge, as soon as we start thinking about ethical design, we start seeing it in everything. Because it’s not just about the screens we design, but the business models behind those very screens. And it’s not just about the business models, but the technical and economic structures that make it possible. For ethical design to be effective, we cannot only consider the design dimension.
So Arledge goes back to his original question, and tries to understand what the real power of designers is when we talk about ethical design, and how this power should be used.
Arledge has no doubt that most decisions that influence design are made long before designers get involved. In practice, the so-called ‘design process’ is almost always constrained by a mountain of initial technical and commercial requirements and constraints.
With that in mind, he introduces us to his conceptual model “The Layered Contexts of Digital Design Ethics”.
A pyramidal model, where the pyramid area represents the “design decision space”, that is, each decision made, or not, that impacts the functioning of a digital product will fall somewhere within that area. The pyramid, in turn, is divided into three layers corresponding to the types of design decisions each layer contains. From bottom to top, we have the infrastructure layer, followed by the business layer and, finally, the interface layer.
Starting at the bottom, the decisions in each layer are more influential than those above them. The different sizes of circles, together with the triangular shape of the pyramid, illustrate how decisions made at the bottom direct and constrain the space for decision making at the top.
Like Overkamp, Arledge also explains throughout his article the various implications each layer has on the final product, and how designers will have to step out of their comfort zone for ethical design to be considered before we get to the design sprints, journey maps or wireframes.
Using Arledge’s words, getting to the layers at the bottom of the pyramid will be much less sexy than designing the interface, but will be much more important for the final product and its users.
