Design as Citizenship: Part 1
Waking up to our place in the problem of design ethics
This series is adapted from my talk at UX Week 2017.
I VIVIDLY REMEMBER waking up on November 9, 2016. I grabbed my phone and checked the news: it wasn’t a dream.
I had stayed up the night before, expecting the close but decisive election of Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States. When the tide suddenly began to turn, and it became obvious Donald Trump would win, I went to bed in a kind of shock. We knew it could happen, but we all knew it wouldn’t, right?
I had no idea what to think. I had thought it would be close, but I couldn’t believe it was real. So many crazy things had happened during the campaign, and I was suddenly forced to grapple with with what it all meant, with the stark reality that we just collectively said, “let’s have more of that for four years.”
And suddenly I felt like I didn’t know my country anymore. I didn’t know my neighbors. I wondered if I really knew my family, my church, my friends, my coworkers.
Maybe you supported Hillary Clinton, or maybe you think our country needed at least some of the change that Donald Trump represented — maybe some sort of anti-establishment shake-up. But no matter which name you selected in the booth, I think you have to acknowledge the campaign was not in any sense normal. It was like the spotlight suddenly turned toward us, and showed us the cracks in our national community. That somehow we could live right next to each other, look at what we thought were the same set of facts, and come to completely different conclusions.
How had this happened? It just didn’t make sense.
Maybe some of the shock that I felt (and I think many others — on both sides) was the sudden evaporation of millions of filter bubbles. Maybe a realization that there’s some truth to it the idea of “the coastal elites,” as dismissive and shallow as it may be. Maybe the divide between the haves and have-nots is worse than we thought, maybe we really are living in different worlds. Maybe the cracks are spreading faster than we feared.
MY CAREER BEGAN as a graphic designer, mostly for web design, print communications, and visual identity systems, eventually expanding into motion, filmmaking, writing, and music work. As my career progressed, I explored various creative disciplines, and found myself pushing upstream to better ground the work we were doing in a rich understanding of the people we were doing it for. I caught the design thinking wave, used it to spread some of the mindsets and methods of design, and learned to conduct the design research and synthesis that could uncover unmet human needs and highlight new product or service opportunities.
Product design felt like the way to finally bring it all together — defining, designing, and delivering great experiences that people would love, and getting to integrate the various skillsets I’d built up over the years. I’d finally be able to fulfill the full range of my creative dreams and make a positive impact.
I remember the incredible sense of purpose and opportunity I felt. I could sit in a beautifully-designed office, get a free artisan cold brew from the fridge, play some ping-pong, and design something that could help literally millions of people live better lives.
Looking back, the rise of digital product design was almost like a modern-day gold rush. But instead of shimmering gold flakes at the bottom of a mountain stream, we were promised notoriety, a platform, a chance to “make an impact at scale”. A chance to “make a difference”. And with the rise of design’s influence as a way to not just make things pretty, but to see the world and solve problems through the lens of human need, we were all doing it for people, right? Right?
What a cool opportunity for me, I thought, I and my peers creating the tools that millions of people would use to manage one of the most important parts of their lives.
It didn’t really occur to me at the time how insane that is.
When I got my first tech job, I remember being taken aback by the sheer number of white dudes I found myself surrounded by. I had done a lot of reading prior to that about diversity, but I hadn’t really seen the stark difference in representation until then — and more importantly, hadn’t really seen myself as part of a privileged group.
I’m a 30-something white male, working for a highly successful company in one of the wealthiest areas in the world. I’m grateful for that, but let’s be honest: it would be hard to find someone more privileged than me. Before then, it had never really hit home. I worked every day with people from very different backgrounds, places, resources, and perspectives, but I hadn’t really realized how different their experience of America could be from mine.
Seeing how hard people I knew had been hit by the results of the election forced me to acknowledge something: If this had been a standard, run-of-the-mill election, I almost certainly would have gone about my business, enjoying my stable career, comfortable salary, and an optimistic take on the future (especially my future), just as before. I may not have agreed with all the views and policies of the winner, but I had to admit: the status quo benefitted me. Keeping things the way they were worked great for me. My future seemed bright, and reliable.
But that week there was an eerie quiet in the office. I was on conference calls where people I worked with broke down crying. As I listened, I heard people talk about how they felt a message had been sent that day that they don’t matter, that we hadn’t really made the progress they thought we had as a society, that they weren’t wanted, that there wasn’t as much of a path to success for them.
And I thought about the role that tech and design had played in it all.
It’s easy to see the breathtaking pace of technological and product innovation as almost entirely good: a software-like incremental march toward optimization. Technology had felt that way for me, as my life had gotten more and more comfortable, and as I and others had found new ways to connect or express ourselves.
We — the designers — helped make that happen.
But sometimes the prototypes we made in our gleaming offices with perfect paragraph length and ideal user-generated content and profile images filled with stock photos of beautiful people were a lot like our view of the world: safe for people like us, and dangerously unrealistic.
Sometimes our perfect prototypes were a lot like our view of the world: safe for people like us, and dangerously unrealistic.
Because there was the dark side of it all too: the unintended consequences. We’d fixed some problems, but from the things we made, chilling new ones emerged.
The way algorithms showed people on both sides what they wanted to see, amplifying or reinforcing prejudices, and keeping important perspectives out. The way vulnerable people had been harassed and abused on platforms built for creative expression and relationship-building. The way people’s worst or weakest impulses had been exploited in the name of empowerment. The way the truth had been distorted by its presentation. The way viral moments had leapt out of context and ruined reputations. The way we’d lost our ability to think deeply, pay attention, or make a careful argument.
We — the designers — helped make that happen too.
It had begun to dawn on me gradually before that, but November 9th hammered it home. I found myself in a slow-motion internal crisis, wondering what the role of design is in our society, how far our responsibility goes in our design decisions, and how to know if we’re doing good. The sheer enormity and complexity of it all was overwhelming. All this change, at immense scale and breathtaking speed, mediated by the things we make.
When I was a print communication designer, it was pretty straightforward. Messages were powerful, but for the most part, we were trying to put something out there, have someone see it and remember it, and go about their day.
It’s just not that simple anymore.
When you design a social media news feed, you’re deciding what kind of conversation matters, and who should be included. When you’re designing a profile page, the emphasis of visual hierarchy is sending a message about what’s important in evaluating someone as a host or a writer or a subject matter expert. When you use machine learning to personalize an experience or optimize around the behavior of a group, you’re baking biases into the system — your biases, or the biases of the group, maybe harmful biases you can’t even detect.
Here we are, by the numbers a relatively small, homogeneous group, making decisions that shape how thousands, millions, or even billions of people see the world, build relationships, make decisions, spend their money. What qualifies us to make decisions of that size and influence? We’re like legislators crafting a healthcare bill: entrusted with enormous power, and not necessarily qualified to understand or anticipate the implications. How many designers are really thinking through the secondary or tertiary effects of their design decisions? Are you?
Together we are creating an environment for people to live part of their lives in. Embedded in that environment are incentives and rewards that subtly shape how people see themselves, the people around them, and their relationship to the rest of society.
I think the design and tech community is starting to wake up, and maybe, like me, ask ourselves, “What have we done? And what are we supposed to do?”
The urgency and difficulty of these questions demands an answer, and we need better methods to anticipate and consider the effects of our design decisions as we work.
But if we don’t start somewhere more fundamental, methods will never help us.
I share the first of two principles I think we need to start with in Part 2.
