Ethics? We don’t need no stinking ethics!
There is a growing conversation about the need for ethics in design. Much of this discussion in design circles has focused on dilemmas of privacy and questions of the propriety of user data. More recently, of course, we have seen companies like Facebook called to account for their role in aiding those who intended to improperly influence the last U.S. Presidential election. Many of these ethical questions and concerns arise from important changes in the nature of software. If the adage “software is eating the world” has gained currency, then the rise of conversations about ethics is at least in part a digestive process.
My place in this conversation is simultaneously personal and professional. More than a year ago, I started working at MD5, a program office in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). And I still regularly field questions from friends, colleagues and even my family about how I came to work within DoD. The clear implication of many of these questions is that I am now working on things and in a space that is ethically dubious at best. Ironically, I have found that, to the contrary, the military has an explicitly ethical work culture. Military traditions of duty and service run deep and create a sense of shared identity and purpose that is a model others can learn from.
Having spent my career leading design firms, a couple of startups, and stewarding a peer community of front-line innovators, the “shift” to working in defense may seem an odd next step. But as I told a friend just yesterday, I have only one enemy in life, and that is boredom. All my life I have been drawn to where the trouble is (because that’s where boring reliably isn’t). Trust me when I say that there’s no greater trouble than that facing defense innovators these days.
The headline above refers to the famous line from Treasure of the Sierra Madre: “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.” This line somehow evokes for me the attitude, long held by many, that business is an ethic-frees zone. Though many business schools now teach ethics courses, Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman famously rejected the notion that businesses have any kind of social responsibility: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
Of course there are many who disagreed with Friedman then, and perhaps still more who disagree now. And while there are number of “tech firms” being called on the carpet over allegations of questionable ethics, from Uber to Facebook, there is a strong sense in the design community that the progressive work culture of software businesses are at the vanguard of ethical business practice. This is certainly the signal intended to be sent by Google’s cultural values slogan, “Don’t Be Evil.”
For a while now, I have been attracted and engaged in the growing number and kinds of conversations at the intersection of design, ethics and business. As I said, I am a moth to the flame of Trouble with a capital T. Such trouble is in abundance in these conversations, and I mean that in the good way. It is a sign, I think and hope, that we are getting at fundamental and root questions about how influential businesses and institutions either make the conditions of our living together better or not.
There are many changes one could point to that might plausibly explain the urgency of this nexus of conversation, from climate change to platforms with billions of users, like Facebook and Google. For me, the most significant change is the coming of age of pervasive computing as an environment.
Jorge Arango, in his lucid and important book, Living in Information, lays out the groundwork for the ethical terrain of “information environments”; the “places” created by networks of computers, communications infrastructure and the ever increasing number of sensors and devices that make up what now can only quaintly be called, the Internet.
It is significant that over the last 5–10 years, as high speed broadband networks have become more and more ubiquitous and globally pervasive, whereas we use to “go online” to join the ‘Net, we are now simply immersed in it. What used to be a conscious, intentional, and elective activity is now simply the water we swim in, the air we breathe. We cannot opt out of being enmeshed in this environment without in a very real sense, opting out of the social world. Once upon a time, using software meant booting up a word processing program or a spreadsheet. Now a days you might well be enmeshed in software, sensors and networks when you take a shower.
The issues driving conversations about ethics in design are both messy and nettlesome. Should we be talking about establishing professional ethics, like those doctors, lawyers and engineers have? Or should ethics be focused on questions of impact, like who should “own” the user data created by the interactions of users on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Google? These kinds of questions have gained even more momentum as voice interfaces and devices with always on microphones await our queries and commands and an AI stands ready to engage.
The answer to these questions and more is, simply, YES! Ethics belong to human conversations about how we ought to live together. The Greek root of the word ethics (or ethikos) is ethos, which describes the guiding beliefs of a community. What are the guiding beliefs of the design community? Is there one? It is precisely the delineation of professional communities and the explicit expression of norms and practices that has made it possible for some professional communities to establish professional ethics.
It is not clear to me that this model or path is the one that designers ought to follow. Designing is more pervasive than lawyering and doctoring, and I think even more broad as an activity than engineering, although in many places these days design and engineering are conjoined twins. But the real reason I think we should not over focus on the need to develop a professional ethic for designers is that we should not rush to “solve” the problems raised by the myriad ethical quandaries facing designers and their designing, Rather, I think that we need to practice “staying with the trouble.”
Staying with the trouble, a phrase coined by Donna Haraway, seems to me a excellent way to enter into and learn how to take seriously the complexity of the ethical terrain designers now work in. It is not that all of the drivers of our ethical concerns are new, but that the pervasiveness, ubiquity and inescapability of many of our designs are. We are still new to this world we are making, there is much we have yet to understand about the coming future in which we live not only within techologized “computational” environments, but that of new robot kin, new intelligences, new species and all kinds of new worlds, both here on Earth and beyond it.
For those of us who like trouble, this is all good news. Not because we are happy about things going wrong, but because we are anxious to engage in the meaningful and purposeful work of finding better ways to live together. For those who fear the rising tide, the tempestuous waters of multiplying ethical questions, I say…come on in, the Trouble’s fine.
