It’s time for a Humanity-Centered Design
A new approach to create technology for our society
We can’t turn an eye blind anymore, too many issues are emerging from an individual, social and political perspective. We need to rethink the way we build technology.
The Internet, the Self, the World
Technology and communication are changing society in three ways.
1 — THE PERCEPTION OF SELF
The psychological impact of social media on our daily life
(our life is not as miserable as we think)
Products like Facebook or Instagram allow us to continuously compare our life to everyone else, and since the majority of us only post positive experiences, that gives us a very biased perception of reality. We are constantly exposed to a “very best of” other people lives, but it’s almost impossible to take it into account and that brings us to evaluate our own lives as less good. This exposes us to feelings of generic dissatisfaction, unfitness, up until anxiety and depression.
But that’s just part of the problem, on a higher level “Technological innovation and communication have brought people to have a much greater need for self-fulfillment, has provide many more tools to achieve it, and many more frustrations for not succeeding. We all think to deserve more, worried to achieve more and blame someone else if we do not thrive. We’ve all been convinced of this by TV first, but mostly by the Internet later. Plus the Internet has also given us the tools to actually succeed (…) and has accustomed us to the thought that everything is accessible (…) A sense of permanent competition which makes us think of others’ success as a privilege and every our failure as an injustice.” (Luca Sofri)
2 — THE PERCEPTION OF THE WORLD WE HAVE
The information warfare
(the World is not as bad as it looks)
People with an agenda have learnt how to take advantage of social media tools nurturing emotion over reason, promoting fake news and conspiracy theories in order to change the narrative, manipulate the news cycle and spread a subtle propaganda that changes the vision of the world according to their interests.
3 — THE PERCEPTION OF THE WORLD WE DON’T HAVE
The filter bubble
(The World is far more diverse than the one we are exposed to)
“Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook’s news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want — which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs”.
The Facebook echo chamber and the Google filter bubble determine that we are less and less exposed to different people and ideas. This is the perfect ground for the development of a superficial, biased mindset, for intolerance, bigotry, hate for minorities and an overall radicalization of ideas.
The moral responsibility in creating digital communication tools
“Let’s admit it, we in the consumer web industry are in the manipulation business. We build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people “users” and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly addicted.”
— Nir Eyal
“But this is the people’s will, we just create tools, it’s their choice to decide how to use them”. No, this is just not true, and we know it.
All the people that work on the creation of digital communication products, UX designers, digital marketers, growthhakers… We continuously track huge amount of data and analytics, we make tests, we design tools, features and campaigns in order to control users behaviour, brand exposure and buying impulses. At the same time we know that the way we design tech products have a huge impact on how people will behave, on their emotions, and ultimately on their lives.
So how do we deal with this moral responsibility? Nyr Eyal in his book Hooked faced the issue of morality in building persuasive digital products proposing a system which he calls the manipulation matrix.
He believes that changing behaviour of the users per se is not always negative, there are apps that drive us into healthy food habits for example. So how we determine what is moral and what is not? He claims that “when you create something that you will (personally) use and believe makes the user’s life better, you’re facilitating a healthful habit”.
This is tricky: even though there are some habits that are clearly healthful, some others are more difficult to grasp. Is being hooked at Facebook the whole day a healthful habit? Is the unconditional reflex of getting back to Instagram to check how many likes we get a healthful habit? Remember: these behaviours do not happen incidentally, and these products have been designed in order to leave very small space to free will. And on a higher level, what are the consequences in creating newsfeeds that just show a narrow, biased vision of the world in order to make the users to stick with their comfort zone?
Because of my sociological background I tend to see the whole picture in terms of recurrent historical patterns. Let’s put it like that: the Internet industry is so new that we still haven’t taken into account all the ethical implications in creating these kind of products and their psychological, social and political consequences. Isn’t it what happened on a smaller scale with the automotive and the tobacco industry? At the beginning it was the far west, anything was permitted in order to maximize usage and revenues. Then people started to realize the side effects of some of the products “features” and, well, at least we have taken some steps in order to make them less toxic and addictive and in making people aware of the dangers related to their usage. To go on with the parallel, my feeling is that we are still at the point where there is no clear connection between cigarettes and cancer and so even the makers don’t understand the whole consequences of their product usage.
From Human-Centered Design to Humanity-Centered Design
Some might say that this is a neo-luddite vision. On the contrary, I do believe that it is imperative to adopt a more conscious approach if we want to push further the technological progress in an healthful way for us and the world.
The majority of the most successful technological products that we use every day are conceived and designed under the rules of Human-Centered design. It is an approach to designing interactive systems that aims to make systems usable and useful by focusing on the users, their needs and requirements, and by applying human factors/ergonomics, usability knowledge, and techniques.
My proposal is to change the approach, the perspective and the focus from the user (the human) to “humanity”.
Principles of Humanity-Centered design
What do I mean for “Humanity”?
THE APPROACH
We must design products that respect people’s well being.
(Humanity as the quality of being kind to people)
e.g. Tomorrow there might be space for a new breed of social media products for the user to choose. Products that are designed not only to maximize revenues, but that also take into account any particular consequence that the a feature might imply on a psychological and personal scale. Products that for example will leave space for free will, that will foster face to face interaction and a less competitive and addictive environment.
THE PERSPECTIVE
We must design products for people as member of our society.
(Humanity as the totality of human beings)
We must design products starting from the Human not as a single, but as part of a whole. Adding a layer to the typical dualism Product / User, and changing the perspective to Product / User / Society.
e.g. Tomorrow there might be space for a new breed of products for the user to choose. Products that are designed not only to maximize revenues, but that also take into account any particular consequence that the a feature might imply on a social scale. Products that will preserve and maybe promote justice, liberty, equality and fraternity.
THE FOCUS
We must design products to preserve the human side of the interaction between humans and machines.
(Humanity as the counterpart in the human-machine dualism)
Design in order to respect the evolutionary traits of the human species.
e.g. If tomorrow we want to deal with brain implants people must be sure that the whole physical and design experience is conceived in order to respect the way in which humans naturally behave and there will be no hidden addictions, harms or unnatural machine led patterns.
What we can do
The amount of technology that pervades us is so deep and wide that it’s imperative to start building technology with far more attention to ourselves, our society, our world.
I think to Humanity-Centered Design (HYCD) as a respectful approach to create technology products the same way we think at “sustainability” as a respectful approach to create physical products.
So what can we do about it?
TALK
Raise questions and find answers. What are the specific ways in which tech products might psychologically and socially harm us? What are the unhealthy behaviours that they promote? In which specific way these products can be exploited by people for their goals? Are there any dangers for the people and society? What are the consequences? What can we do to prevent that?
ASK
Ask the owners and the creators of major and minor tech companies to develop socially respectful products, the way we ask to brick and mortar companies to build sustainable products that will not harm our health.
BUILD
Build a new class of products designed with a specific approach, which I call Humanity-Centered Design, in order for the people to choose whether they want to engage in a different lifestyle, more technologically respectful for them, for the others and for the world we live in.
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