Sustaining Ethical Design
So how can we ensure that ethical design is not only preached, but actually practiced? There’s still a long way to go, but we’re optimistic that change will occur.
Redefine how we measure success.
In the Calvin and Hobbes comic above, Calvin notes, “In the real world, people care about success, not principles.” It’s easy to forget that ROIs and KPIs are not the only things that matter nowadays. Ironically, some of the very products that have been criticized for their ethical mishaps have been the conduits for a counterpart to monetary currency: social currency. Companies can no longer afford to ignore the ethical ramifications of their products. Remember the #DeleteUber scandal, when the ride-sharing company got put on blast and lost 200,000 users for undermining the protest against Trump’s Muslim Ban? How about the mess that Facebook has gotten itself into? Looking back, when would have been a good time for Zuckerberg to heed the warnings that perhaps, just perhaps, the social network had gone a bit too far? It is becoming more and more evident that the current neoliberal frenzy in which our industry operates is not sustainable - not for the employees, not for our society, certainly not for the environment. We need to seriously scale back the unrestrained race for constant growth.
Inclusive teams are imperative. So is decolonizing design.
This is no longer a cherry on top, this is the goddamn sundae. Time and time again, studies have shown how having inclusive and diverse teams improve collective decision making. Having a variety of different thinkers who are all empowered to speak in the brainstorm session makes a world of a difference. Recently, it was shown that facial recognition systems were biased in that they identified white men significantly better than they identified women of color. What did the teams that created those systems look like? This could have huge implications as facial recognition is being used more and more in law enforcement; in a country that already brutalizes certain people of color (namely, Black and brown folx), this could be disastrous.
Furthermore, when conducting the empathize phase of your design process, it is critical to make sure that the teams conducting and contributing to the research are representative of the user demographics as well. Participatory design that centers and compensates these communities is a great way to bring the users into the researching realm, so as to offer authentic insight. However, an important caveat is that if your product is already racist and flawed, adding a person of color on the team does not make your product acceptable. In fact, tokenizing people of color for shallow diversity efforts, especially when building problematic products, is actively harming those employees.
Not only that, we need to make serious efforts at decolonizing design. As a practice, design within tech has largely been shaped by Western logics of extraction and conquest. It has also been used in Western colonial projects spanning across history. We need to take a hard look at our design methodologies and motivations to see how we might center other epistemologies from Indigenous and Black communities.
Ethical practices need to be emphasized and prioritized in the boardroom and C-suite.
This should be so obvious, but as we have seen, that is not always the case. Corporate social responsibility is not just a catchphrase; it needs to be implemented across all channels of a company. It’s not enough to talk the talk these days. Company executives need to maintain transparency around their products and show that they prioritize stakeholders (and non-stakeholders) just as much as they prioritize shareholders.
Pay it forward by applying this ethical design framework and speaking up.
Several designers have the privilege of choosing to work for companies that prioritize users on an ethical level, which is a great and empowering mindset. However, if you are a junior designer and currently do not find yourself in a position where you can easily choose a more ethical employer, consider advocating to apply the methodologies outlined in this framework on your current team. It is never too early to strengthen and assert your voice as a designer. As designers, we have a head start when it comes to taking an ethical approach in our process. The vocabulary is already there for us. After all, this framework is simply a detailed exploration of using design thinking to create human-centric solutions. Also more importantly, consider joining organizing efforts. There are a lot of unions that have formed at large tech companies, as well as other adhoc organizing efforts at other companies. See what you can learn and contribute.
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