Why Should Designers Care?
Designers, especially in tech, have privilege. We’ve had the privilege to make our decent tech salaries, the privilege to work remotely during an ongoing pandemic, and the privilege to effectively shape our users’ realities. We are literally designing their choice architectures in certain contexts. Our unlicensed influence as designers has been compared to that of licensed doctors and lawyers. With that amount of power comes an enormous amount of responsibility as well.
Historically, design has played a huge role in many problematic, violent, and oppressive projects. Hostile architecture, the incorporation of ugly and uncomfortable spikes to prevent people experiencing homelessness from taking refuge on public furniture, is designed by designers. Amazon’s employee gamification and surveillance tools, which track and goad workers to work harder, is designed by designers. Snapchat filters, which caught notoriety for playing into colorism and literally lightening users’ faces, is designed by designers. These examples, amongst many others, are all designed by designers.
Historically, design has played a huge role in many problematic, violent, and oppressive projects.
In modern, Western design, there’s a lot of discourse around how designers need to use their empathy to solve problems for others. Packaged under the “enterprisey” branding of Design Thinking, the work that designers do is championed as some sort of panacea to societal ills. Is there a problem? No fear, we’ve got sticky notes. We cannot forget that the design ethos which has proliferated in tech emerged from and perpetuates white, capitalist hegemony. The so-called empathy we muster while conducting user research is done not only to solve users’ problems, but also to feed to our bottom line. The empathy we tout as designers in this technosolutionist system often falls risk to practices that are paternalist at best and extractive at worst.
We cannot forget that the design ethos which has proliferated in tech emerged from and perpetuates white, capitalist hegemony.
The designs we generate have seemingly merged under this hegemony, with cloning and copying rampant amongst our apps. Does LinkedIn really need a Stories section? These copycat designs and repetition of deceptive and manipulative patterns is not surprising. Under a system which promotes growth at all cost and views engagement of time and data as monetary gain, it is to be expected that our digital products converge as they all race to employ the design patterns that generate the fattest bottom line.
Designers have to care because our profession has a lot of debt to pay back to society. We have to care because if we truly got into the field to solve problems, then we need to critically analyze our own shortcomings and see how we might fix them. We have to care because if we are occupying such a position of privilege and power, it would be a shame to not leverage it for making our society more antiracist, abolitionist, sustainable, and compassionate.