Evil by Design | Seattle Interactive 2019
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Kit Oliynyk (Speaker) Senior Business Design Lead, Ventera The ethos of "makers"—how making things and simply being creative for the sake of creativity can be a bad thing, if we're not willing to be responsible for our legacy and pretend that “design isn’t political.” This session will consider case studies of companies and products that are making our lives and our society worse—sometimes unintentionally. We'll talk about dark patterns and how they could cost millions of dollars—and, sometimes, human lives. There are three areas of transformation where we as an industry can get better: Self-identity: Transform our beliefs to shift from pure craftsmanship to becoming the makers of social good, evolve our definition of success from “moving fast and breaking things” into the sustainability and health of our society. Connection: Engage with as many people as possible in our companies (beyond just tech), overcome our biases through diversity and inclusion, and share beliefs and values that empower our partners and us to care about people, together. Future-proofing: Ask questions to one another to collectively identify the emerging risk zones for our products and services using a variety of tools, including EthicalOS, moral value maps, “worst-case scenario” workshops and more.
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Evil by Design | Seattle Interactive 2019
- 1. Evil by Design fiorineKit Oliynyk
- 2. Evil by Design fiorineKit Oliynyk
- 4. XKCD
- 7. Average attention span in seconds Humans in 2000 Humans in 2013 Goldfish
- 8. Good by Design fiorineKit Oliynyk
- 10. Bruce Mars/Pexels / Hareem Mannan
- 12. Personal ethics Shared ethics Ethical processes
- 13. XKCD
- 15. Designed by Adrian Herritt
- 16. Buro Millenial/Pexels / Hareem Mannan
- 18. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason. — David Hume
- 19. Presen t Future 🤔 😍 Design what ought to be what is
- 20. Brandon Moore, George RedHawk
- 21. Utilitarianism Design to make some people feel better. Consequentialism Design to make no one feel worse.
- 23. Intent Is this a worthy problem to solve? Result s What consequences does our solution have?
- 24. We are not the creative class anymore. We are now the responsible class.
- 25. craft creative solutions attention to detail user empathy technology is neutral communication future-proofing questions attention to the whole picture social responsibility technology is driven by beliefs
- 27. — Alan Cooper
- 28. It’s not enough to be a good person. We need a system of shared beliefs.
- 37. rawpixel.com/Pexels / Hareem Mannan
- 38. XKCD
- 40. Personal ethics Shared ethics Ethical processes
- 41. Survey by SHRM, 2017
- 42. Survey by Clutch, Politics in the Workplace, 2017
- 43. When it’s a matter of “right” or “wrong”, people become less tolerant of others who hold the opposite view. Linda Skitka
- 45. Ethics is doing the right thing, even if it is hard or uncomfortable, together. Morals is knowing the difference between right and wrong for yourself.
- 46. When you decide that you want to be just brave it it opens up way more possibilities than trying to be perfect ever does. — AOC
- 47. personal morals craft tools design principles “us vs. them” shared beliefs cultural tools ethical principles shared responsibility
- 48. Slides by Alla Weinberg
- 49. Slides by Alla Weinberg
- 50. Simplicity Ingenuity Delight ✓ ©︎⚙
- 51. Steve Cutts
- 52. medicine I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.
- 53. Harvard University’s DASH repository
- 54. 1. Respect people as individuals 2. Do no harm, while maximizing value 3. Examine any affected population archive.org / David Panarelli
- 55. …the term “research” designates an activity designed to test a hypothesis, permit conclusions to be drawn, and thereby to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge…
- 56. medicine I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability.
- 58. Jared Spool
- 59. Jared Spool
- 62. New York Times
- 63. Niall Carson/Press Association, via Associated Press
- 64. Saying no is a design skill. Asking why is a design skill. Rolling your eyes is not. — Mike Monteiro Photo by Scout Books
- 65. Life, uh, finds a way.
- 66. Increasing revenues Decreasing costs Increasing market share Increasing shareholder value Increasing loyalty Decreasing social harm Sustaining society Increasing social good
- 67. Personal ethics Shared ethics Ethical processes
- 68. Lu Han
- 69. Aaron Lewis
- 72. ethicsfordesigners.com Template by Jet Gispen
- 74. Karwai Ng and Will Anderson
- 75. designethically.com / Katherine Zhou
- 76. Sheryl Kababa / Artefact
- 77. ethicalos.org
- 78. ethicalos.org
- 79. ethicalos.org
- 81. Photo by New York Times
- 82. The new maker is the maker of social good.
- 83. fiorineKit Oliynyk Evil by Design
Notas do Editor
- Hey, everyone. How’s the conference so far? How’s the energy? Good, ‘cause we gonna talk about some pretty dark stuff today—how we screwed our society up as designers, and what to do about it. We also talk about creativity without responsibility, why we got used to it, and how we might consider redefining ourselves.
- I’m sure you’ve seen some of these pretty headlines before. We’ve spent a lot of time lately figuring out what went wrong. How did we end up building a technological dystopia instead of the brave new world?
- We just wanted to make stuff, right? We were so good at our craft. We believed in our own version of the future, and we’ve been making new things to move fast and break this old world, regardless of consequences.
- We believed the tech is “neutral”, like the house utilities, and we kept making new ones. We’ve treated people merely as consumers of our craft, as users, and we’ve built our businesses around it. And in our naive and blind optimism we were dead sure people gonna use our products in the exact same way we’ve prescribed them.
- Our business partners (and sometimes our own research) suggested that people don’t like to think—so we made algorithms to think for them. Few years later our algorithms are biasing our minds and disconnecting us from reality.
- Our business partners wanted more engagement—so we’ve designed a dopamine economy. We used interaction design to hook people up and make them addicted to our products. And we’ve succeeded. We’ve enthralled people with our beautifully crafted apps, and we made sure they’d never let go of their phones again. We barely have the attention span of the goldfish now. But it’s not just our partners' fault. We were so proud of ourselves and our creative power that we didn’t want to ask the hard questions—how exactly our work is affecting human lives?
- None of this is probably new to you now. But I had a rough awakening myself, I went through a journey of redefining my craft and my identity as a designer, so I felt like I need to wake other people up. But more and more people started saying: “Hey, enough preaching already, we get it, give us some ethical frameworks to take back to work!” Ok, cool, looks like people are already woke!
- So I’ve started sharing toolkits and frameworks for ethical decision-making. And some people said: “Hey, wait a second, what’s this philosophical mumbo-jumbo? Philosophy is useless. This is a design conference, I want something cool for my craft. Come on, Kit, you used to talk about UI animation—that was good stuff!”
- And the more I kept talking to different people the more I’ve realized something. People in our industry are in some very different places in their maturity and ethical journeys—and, most importantly, have different beliefs. Some people already believe in the social good, social justice, all of that, and might’ve already considered the ethical implications of their work. And some people think all of this social stuff is someone else’s problem. And that’s ok.
- It’s ok to have different beliefs. The problem is, if we’re unwilling to declare our own beliefs and learn what our colleagues believe in, it might be very hard to make ethically responsible products. In fact, in might be very hard to even define what we consider right or wrong as a group.
- There are still some people who want to be convinced ethics are important. There are some people who are ready to ask the right questions. And there’s a whole lot in between. How do we get from being an good person into being on an good team, into being in a good company? Let’s talk about it.
- I got my Computer Science degree in the National Technology University of Ukraine, and back then philosophy was a mandatory class. Well, in post-Soviet universities everything was mandatory—we couldn’t really pick and choose our classes. But I remember hating the philosophy in particular. It seemed so useless. So far-off and detached from our actual craft.
- So I’ve spent a lot of time at just that—getting better at my craft, and being a maker. First, I learned how to make things pretty. Then I realized that it’s not about pretty, so I learned how to make things usable. And fast. And simple. All of that. I had a different self-identity back then: I thought what makes me a good designer is profound knowledge of my craft, all the tools I’ve mastered and all the ways how I can change existing things and make new things.
- Someone gave me this laptop sticker, and I wore it proudly for years. I wanted to make stuff, fast, and I didn’t care for the consequences. I enjoyed my godlike power of creation, and I was really proud to call myself that—creative.
- I looked at some slow and complicated website and I thought “It ought to be simpler and faster. I can make it better.”. I didn’t realize that “better” means “simpler and faster” only in my head, only according to my personal beliefs.
- Uber looked at public transportation in the U.S. and thought “we ought to invent a new kind of transportation system, faster and simpler.” And now we’re stuck in traffic among hundreds of other Uber cars, and it’s not as simple as just walking over to a bus stop.
- Then I’ve learned of this guy, David Hume, a 18-century philosopher. He said that we can observe WHAT IS, the nature of our reality with reason, and science, and pragmatism. But whenever we think WHAT OUGHT TO BE, this is not an objective reasoning, this is our morals and beliefs talking.
- In other words, we use our brains to observe the present, and we use our heart to speculate about the future. And design happens right in between those two. I used to believe that technology is neutral, but according to Hume any decision, any design that changes WHAT IS into WHAT OUGHT TO BE is very much not neutral. It’s personal. It’s an ethical choice.
- I’ve also learned of this Greek philosophy called Gnosticism—it’s about understanding the ways of gods. Greeks believed in many gods, and in particular this guy, the Demiurge. Demiurge is a godlike entity who created and maintains the physical Universe. The Creator. The Ultimate Craftsman. However, he is not the kind of god that holds your hand, and absolves your sins — there might be another god for that. Demiurge only cares about making. He creates merely because he can. Because in his mind making is beautiful and noble all by itself. Fuck it. Ship it. But he’s not The God; he’s not divine, he’s just a maker. He makes mistakes. His ethical choices are flawed. And everything the Demiurge created is fundamentally flawed because it can bring suffering to the people.
- Previously, I thought I should design to make human lives better. I thought my job was empathy for THE user, for one human being at a time. I loved focusing on those “happy paths”. It felt so good, so self-righteous. It was so easy to believe that if I can make one person happy, it’ll make EVERYONE happy. And that would make me a great designer and a very good person.
- In reality I can build an algorithm that could make a couple of people happy now. Maybe. But it could make a million people suffer just a few years later. By focusing my empathy on a couple of people I’m potentially excluding everyone else while missing broader aggregate effects. So I guess I’ve learned that empathy is not enough. Human-centered design is not enough.
- So I’ve learned to think about the consequences of my design instead. Before thinking what ought to be and speculating about my personal vision of the future, I wanted to make sure I’m not making anyone’s life worse. Instead of thinking HOW to make stuff, I started asking the questions. What could go wrong with my design? Or better yet, is it the right problem to solve?
- I used to be so proud about being creative. But I had to redefine my self-identity, what makes me successful as designer in my own eyes. I’ve realized that we’re not the creative class anymore. We’re no longer in the business of creative solutions, we’re in the business of disaster-proofing our collective future. And I realized that if I want to be good at it, I have to replace a bunch of beliefs in my head with new ones.
- I started valuing communication over craft, “why” over “how”, questions over solutions. But hey, this is not a call to action. This is my personal journey, my personal beliefs. I cannot force anyone to believe this stuff. The reason I’m even telling you all of this is to remind that before we get into any kind of ethical design process at large scale, before we learn how to make social good as a team, we have to decide what’s good and what’s evil for ourselves. There’s no one else who can make that decision for us.
- Was Cambridge Analytica an abuse or an intentional use case? Is keeping Nazis on Twitter a stress case? I can only use my own beliefs to make that call. But products are made by teams, and I don’t know the real story behind the teams that made those products. What did they believe in? What did their business leaders believe in? It’s so easy to point fingers and call a bunch of companies super-villains just because they’re doing bad shit in my personal system of beliefs.
- It’s hard to fit human beings into a binary framework. We’re not monsters. There are a lot of good people in the tech industry. And most of us care about our society. So why do bad things happen regardless of our good intentions?
- Because when we make decisions alone, we’re likely to make mistakes. We usually know what’s good and what’s bad for ourselves, but we don’t know what’s good at scale. We don’t know how to talk with each another about ethics. We don’t have a system of shared beliefs.
- Let me tell you a story about how good intentions can turn bad when we don’t know how to talk about it. There was this developer named Ryan who was designing a payment flow for the ticketing website. He saw other websites using a purchase timer, but he wasn’t sure if it’s a good solution. He probably bought some tickets online before, and it just didn’t feel right for some reason.
- So he went on StackExchange and asked the community a question. Notice the assumptions he has: he feels that the timer might be “pushy,” but he cannot say why. He also doesn’t question the tech itself—what if there could be other ways to prevent overselling the tickets? The fascinating part is that his guilt of possibly being too pushy translates into a desire to hide the timer, yet keep the 10-minute reservation limit.
- Half an hour later a local community expert swoops in with a bunch of peremptory statements. No, people don’t like surprises. People like being in control. People don’t want to make a mistake. We’ve built an arbitrary 10-minute reservation period instead of tracking the sold tickets in real time. But we want the experience to be positive, so let’s actively help those poor suckers complete the purchase as fast as possible. Period.
- Just 2 hours later another person shows up to point out this seemingly obvious fact: people might feel the timer is frustrating, annoying and possibly panic-inducing. People might make mistakes while trying to fill a huge payment form under the time pressure. They might mistype their credit card number or abandon the whole thing in utter despair, so there won’t be any sale whatsoever.
- But it was too late: the first response got upvoted as the best answer. This story happened in 2011. Imagine how many developers worldwide were searching for answers on StackExchange since then and considered this purchase timer as the best industry practice. Imagine how many of them didn’t even read past the first answer. This is how we set precedents by every little decision we make. Such a shame.
- We all make mistakes. Our judgment might be flawed, we’re ignorant, and we need more perspective. These guys on StackExchange sought answers and precedents only from their peers, software developers. When we ask questions to the same limited group of people, we get the same answers over and over. We get biased. And we build those biases into our products and services.
- We build weight tracking products that scorn women for getting pregnant. How could this happen? Perhaps this tech company didn’t have enough women on their team to remind them that gaining weight during pregnancy is perfectly normal.
- This soap dispenser was meticulously designed and engineered by professionals, the tech specs of this sensor were discussed at lengths, and it went through some proper QA testing. How could THAT happen? Perhaps there were not enough people of color on the team—or, better yet, just no one to ask the right question at the right time. Because it shouldn’t take a person of color to make sure there are no racist soap dispensers in our workplaces.
- Our companies are making bold statements about diversity, but rarely do something real. But even when they do, it’s still super-hard to share our diverse opinions with one another. We’re afraid to speak up, to assert an opinion that’s different from our peers. It gets emotional, it get political, so we keep avoiding it.
- Our personal beliefs are mostly black and white, we’re so sure what’s good and what’s bad for ourselves. Just look how passionately opinionated are people on the internet. But when you put a bunch of people on a team and ask them to make ethical decisions as a group, it gets much harder, much less binary, because people are different and believe in different things.
- Shared ethics are not binary; they are a product of endless conversations we ought to have with one another. We need to shift from personal ethics and morals to politics. We need to get out of our comfort zones and stop avoiding these conversations about our beliefs.
- When I first started talking about this ethical stuff at work, a whole bunch of people (much to my surprise) approached me in private and said “You can’t talk about politics at work, it’s inappropriate”. I was like “Wait a second, but I’m not even talking about politics all that much—I’m talking about beliefs and social justice.” And they said “Well, it’s still your liberal agenda, so you can’t really talk about that stuff at work”. Wow. It was interesting that people instantly equated talking about beliefs and talking about politics, and both felt really uncomfortable to them.
- I got really curious, and I started reading a lot on the subject. I’m an immigrant and I was surprised to learn there’s a sort of social taboo in the US for politics at work—and it’s actively discouraged by companies. In Ukraine where I’m from and many other countries people talk politics all the time—at work, in pubs and restaurants, on the beach and in the church. People feel that asking complete strangers about their views on the society they share with each other makes perfect sense—how else would you get out of your bubble and learn something new?
- But it turns out, there aren’t that many people actually uncomfortable with it. It’s not the talking itself, it’s having different beliefs that scares people. Alright, so I dug deeper. Why is it so hard to talk to someone who has different beliefs?
- University of Illinois did this research in 2005. They’ve measured how far would people sit from each other in a meeting room if they disagree—specifically, if they believe it’s a matter of morals. When we have a moral conviction that our beliefs are “right”, we can’t handle other opinions because they challenge our identities.
- We’re all secretly xenophobic. We’re afraid of anything that’s different, we’re afraid to open ourselves up to new ideas and beliefs. What if those beliefs turn out to better than mine? Does this mean I’m a bad person? We alienate ourselves from people with different views, we get into a bubble. And we feel like otherwise we’d have to contest or CHANGE their beliefs.
- But why does it have to be this way? I think it’s next to impossible to change another adult’s system of beliefs over a short heated conversation. Imagine if we could just talk about individual beliefs—especially in the context of our design work. What if those people, who we choose to see as opponents, happen to believe in the same things we do?
- It is possible to express genuine and respectful curiosity to learn other people’s perspectives without trying to change their mind. It is possible to find the common ground: things both you and your colleagues care about. And at the very least it’s quite possible to simply declare your own beliefs—so that people would understand where you’re coming from when making any design decisions or arguing for any change in your product.
- It feels like we’re at the inflection point. Can we evolve from personal craft and personal morals into shared beliefs and shared responsibility? Can we overcome our fear and start having all of these hard political conversations with our colleagues?
- What are some of the cultural tools that could help foster these conversations? Here’s a helpful framework by Alla Weinberg. It’s important that it starts with the willingness to change: what is our team experiencing right now that we want to be different?
- Say, we’re building a chatbot, and most of our teammates agree that interacting with a “female assistant” feels bad. So as a group, we declare that we believe in gender equality. How do we behave as a group when we have this belief? We stop saying “hey guys”, and start saying “hey folks” instead. We start being respectful of each other’s pronouns. And we end up making a bot that’s completely gender-neutral so that we could avoid bias.
- What happens when our team collectively builds a system of these shared beliefs? They could become our most important design tool. Remember how we used to create design principles for our projects and our teams? Those usually come in threes too. Say, these three: simplicity, ingenuity, delight. Sounds familiar? We pre-package a bunch of really important stuff into these convenient generalized labels. And what kind of decisions are driven by these basic labels?
- We build oversimplified experiences that ignore the “edge cases” and do not account for nuance. We fall for genius new algorithms without realizing the consequences to society. We force people to experience “delight” to make them addicted to our products and endanger their health and well-being.
- What if we use ethical principles instead of design principles? What if we use our shared beliefs as a design tool? All of this ethical stuff is super-old, remember? Ancient Greeks talked about it. And all of this happened before, in other industries. Here’s a story. In 1932 there was an experiment by the US Public Health Service at the Tuskegee University in Alabama. 400 African-American men with syphilis were told they’re being treated for their condition. They weren’t.
- The goal of the study was to research the untreated effects of syphilis until the time of death. Those 400 men were told the study would last only six months. It lasted 40 years. [tone down] They were living with the disease without their knowledge, and dealing with the consequences without their consent. The experiment was meant to end only when all participants had died and been autopsied.
- Over the next few decades, this slowly unfolded into a major public scandal, until in 1974 a National Commission was formed to figure out the ethics of medical research. And five years later they’ve published a thing called The Belmont Report. And here are its three ethical principles.
- Some might say “hey, this is a medical research report, what does it have to do with design?” Here’s how this document defines "research”. Hypothesize, test, and learn. Does this sound familiar now?
- See, doctors found it essential to set ethical principles even to their research—not to mention actually slicing people open, which is also guided by tons and tons of protocols, ethical studies, and constant iterative discussion in the industry. Even the economic impact is covered by the modern version of the Hippocratic oath. What about us?
- What happens when our businesses stand in the way? What if our company makes money off something we believe is unethical? Design is about the exchange of value—between individuals, business and the society. And we can participate in defining the business model by sharing our beliefs across the entire company.
- Businesses are about numbers. Design is about stories. We can and we should tell stories about our work and our beliefs. But is there a way we can turn our beliefs into numbers? How can we quantify social good?
- There are some ways. We’ve tried measuring how good or how bad people feel about our company. This is called NPS, and it doesn’t really work, like Jared Spool would tell you, but it’s a start.
- We can ask questions. For example, we can measure the amount of money our company is spending on call center complaints, lawsuits and penalties to prove the cost of NOT being ethical. There are many people in our companies who could give us this data: lawyers, corporate strategists, PR, and HR folks. What if we start talking ethics with all of them? What if together we can change the way our companies do business?
- One of my favorite examples is the LinkedIn class action in 2015. LinkedIn made a business decision to aggressively increase its market share. It resulted in a design decision to secretly spam people using a misleading design pattern. And it ended up costing $13 million in lawsuits. In addition, between 2015 and 2016 their stock price was cut in half. How’s that for shareholder value?
- Speaking of shareholder value, it was popularized in 1970 by Milton Friedman. Friedman made a statement that only individuals can have a “social responsibility,” while corporations have a fiduciary duty to their employees and shareholders. Corporation has to increase profits at all costs—otherwise it’s “pure and unadulterated socialism.” Notice how politically charged his doctrine was, to begin with. There are still many people who believe this—and often these same people argue that politics are inappropriate at work.
- We can and we should talk about our beliefs at work. If we disagree with our company policies, we should ask questions. This stuff works. Google folks did it. Microsoft folks did it. And many more of us are doing it every month.
- We have a choice to be socially responsible, even if our companies aren’t. Sometimes, our companies might be in a very different place on the ethical journeys, and we just can’t stand it anymore. Well, being able to quit because of your ethical beliefs is a privilege. Lots of people cannot afford to lose a single paycheck. But if you can, remember that you always have that choice.
- Alright, quick palate cleanser. There’s a shared belief that Jeff Goldblum simply makes everything better, so here we go. Take a deep breath. Things aren’t that bad, we’re having more and more of these conversations as an industry, and it’s great. We’re definitely on the right path.
- This stuff is hard. We’d have to learn how to be genuinely curious about other people’s beliefs without offending them. We’d have to overcome our corporate culture of not talking about it at work. We’d have to get direct support from our senior leaders, and make sure our company’s values and beliefs are aligned with ours. And if we get to this point with our teams, we’re already pretty far along on our ethical journey and are far less likely to do some evil by design.
- Now let’s talk about tactics—if we all communicate openly, how to make sure we’d ask the right questions? Some hard future-proofing questions to collectively understand what could go wrong with our product, and what risks we’re possibly facing.
- A good first step is paying close attention to the language we use with our coworkers and product partners. Lu Han from Spotify wrote a great article about it. When we use words like “edge case” or “most of our users” we’re making a judgment call that some people are unworthy of our product. When we say “just add it to the T&C” we’re possibly afraid to consider the ethical implications of our decision and are secretly hoping no one would notice. They will. Call these things out and start a conversation about it.
- Aaron Lewis wrote another article about the language we use when it comes to our work calendars. We all say “let me grab some time on your calendar” or “I’ll squeeze some time in”, because we perceive digital calendars as empty buckets, waiting to be filled with events. Why? Because digital calendars were designed as white and blank by default, as though other people’s time is unaccounted for. Imagine if the team designing it would say: “As a team, we believe that we should respect other people’s time”. How might that change the design and the way we use it?
- A lot of people start by scanning their products for known dark patterns. We love make giant lists of all the things we’ve learned to be bad so that we could avoid them. But hey, remember this Hume guy? We cannot decide what ought to be by reasoning—it’s determined by our passions, our hearts, our beliefs. People are so unique, that we always find new ways to fuck up, to break the laws and set the precedent. It might be impossible to learn what’s wrong by just making a giant list—that’s why dark patterns libraries and codes of ethics don’t always work. Sorry, folks.
- We’re unique, our products are unique, we have to figure this stuff by ourselves. Here’s an idea: try to imagine a Black Mirror episode featuring a technological disaster or a huge public scandal involving your product. Wow, things are suddenly getting real. And yeah, don’t do it with just your peers—designers or developers. Do it with as many people from your company as possible—lawyers and security folks too. Believe me, they might know about disasters and scandals much more than we do.
- Another great tool to find common ground with your stakeholders is building a moral value map. Which values best describe your product—and how might that influence your product decisions? How does your product inhibit, support, limit or enable people in different contexts? Notice how these values might map really well to your previously defined system of shared beliefs.
- If you like canvas as much as I do, here’s an excellent tool for you: The Iceberg Canvas by Karwai Ng and Will Anderson.
- When we go beyond our business’ value proposition and start overlaying it with societal, economic and environmental factors, it can help uncover the real weight of our design decisions and help everyone involved to make the right choice.
- Layers of Effect is a similar tool from designethically.com for understanding the cascading nature of our design decisions. This tool is very helpful to frame the impact of our products and start forecasting some of the unintended consequences it might create.
- Want something prettier? Here’s the most beautiful deck of cards you’ve ever seen: The Tarot Cards of Tech by Sheryl Cababa and other amazing people at Artefact. This deck gives some excellent prompts for our future-proofing conversations to uncover potential risks in our products.
- Finally, here’s my favorite framework called EthicalOS. Let me give you a quick overview.
- This framework structures our dystopian and future-proofing conversations into eight distinct risk zones—to help us think of ALL the ways our products can make people suffer, and make sure we’re not missing something.
- These are the kinds of questions we can ask one another. Notice how much easier it could’ve been to prevent all of these case studies we’ve talked about—if only someone would ask the right question to the right group of people at the right time?
- Having these conversations ain’t easy. Sometimes it’s hard to make the case, to win the argument with your partners about being ethical. These books can help. Educate yourself and your teammates about the consequences of our work—and perhaps next time we could build something more sustainable and healthy for our society.
- Another thing you could do is take a class in ethics—and offer it to your partners and stakeholders. Ethics is now a part of our craft curriculum. We need to learn not just HOW to make things, but rather IF we should make them in the first place.
- We’re neither gods nor monsters. We’re makers. And sometimes we make mistakes. We used to think of ourselves as craftspeople, and we’ve been focusing only on our visions of the future, and the “happy paths” without thinking of consequences. What if we start asking each other some hard questions? What if we tie our design and business incentives not to moving fast and breaking things, but rather to the diversity of thinking, inclusivity and social good in our products?
- One last thought. We can't add design ethics at the end, like sprinkles on top. It has to be a core system of beliefs: yours, and everyone else around you. Everyone is a designer these days. Developers, product managers, business analysts, lawyers—everyone who makes a decision impacting your product and, ultimately, our society is a designer. Talk about your beliefs with all of them. Ask them what’s right and what’s wrong, and let’s make some social good, together. Thank you.