Purpose-driven: Make digital transformations inclusive and sustainable
We witness a dichotomous situation in the world. People challenged by direct access to resources on one side — and the other — a rise in digital domination. Mainly seen in developing countries — the digital imbalance has created a stark disparity with complex dimensions.
Digitization to bridge the digital divide:
A global response to the digital divide issue is providing better infrastructure access through Digitization to address one dimension of the challenge. Simple-to-use digital interfaces built around user-centricity have resulted in easy adoption, ensuring essential services reach more people. Further, public schemes and scaled efforts drive a massive increase in digital adoption.
This paradigm digital shift has resulted in the rapid growth of the consumer tech industry. Transnational corporations capitalize on this demand to drive digital transformation projects in collaboration with the public sector institutions for scaled, impactful, and innovative solutions, giving rise to a new wave of Digital Capitalism.
Against the backdrop of this change, it is essential to address the critical dimensions of digital literacy and maturity for a responsible, inclusive, and sustainable transformation.
Today, Digitization measures broadly address accessibility issues. But it puts a significant responsibility on millions of unprepared people to make sound judgment decisions on its usage. Addictive behaviours and dark patterns, leveraging the knowledge gaps to business advantage is a common occurrence.
This situation negatively impacts the vulnerable groups in the transformation journey — not limited to the social-economic and educationally challenged.
To clarify my point, I’m not contesting the positive power and impact of digital technologies and innovative solutions for complex problems. Neither am I heading against the grain of business operability.
Instead, I present a case for the design of digital solutions to proactively address these sensitivities, which often get ignored in the profit-maximizing model. And frame a core issue at an intersection of the opposing arguments between the ‘cyber-euphoric’ and ‘cyber-sceptics’ — further highlighting an urgent need for a mindset shift to conscious ethical business thinking.
A rise in Digital Capitalism
A peek into digital capitalism takes us back to 20–30 years, when the internet advent led to digital ways of societal and business interactions. The agility and swiftness of digital interactions made it a preferred operation model for organizations.
Since then, the digital landscape has paved new ways of organizing the economy and revolutionary revenue-generating models, as demonstrated by key tech giants like GAFAM leading to a rise in digital capitalism.
It is essential to highlight here that digital capitalism operates on a scalability model resting on the premise of human attention, engagement, and retention. Therefore, consumer tech organizations have started emphasizing delightful experiences to attract a huge customer base for their scalability goals. As a result, customer engagement has become a critical success metric for business growth.
Digital literacy and maturity to achieve inclusive outcomes
The competition and race for monopoly operating through the lens of market force mobilization are evolving into a new design trend in the form of habit-forming solutions. Delightful experiences that started by meeting basic needs have now expanded to intentional or unintentional addictive practices. Further, a strong desire to grow the market share has resulted in data harvesting, copyright infringement, privacy issues, eventually leaving our societies to deal with a rise in surveillance capitalism.
So, while Digitization has the potential to make people digitally savvy, it does not guarantee digital literacy and puts the digitally non-mature — the vulnerable segment of the population — at a disadvantage. However, literacy and maturity can be achieved only with time.
As a result, digital democracy today favours a specific category — the “evolved” segment of people who use it for the right reasons and ignores the social reality, in which people evolve at different stages. Further, our design decisions fail to recognize the many life challenges, physical vulnerabilities, and emotional offsets that affect the daily behavioural choices.
When we assume or expect people to use their discretion to make evolved choices, our design decisions can result in harmful consequences for people failing against those assumptions.
With the same rigour to drive digital transformation, we must be mindful of driving inclusive and sustainable solutions to address all types of people.
Therefore, the design of the digital systems and solutions must bear the responsibility to address these potentially harmful issues through ethical choices.
An urgent need for ethical business thinking
Ethical decisions at each stage of the solution design can address these challenges. However, ethics is deep, highly subjective to cultural, socio-economic, and political contexts. Much like the legal aspects, ethical design choices require nuanced contextual interpretation and understanding of sensitivities.
Given that design ethics is more philosophical, it is best interwoven in the design process as a practice. Which fundamentally requires a shift in an organization’s natural ways of thinking about its business growth:
· A shift from a profit-maximizing model to a purpose-driven organizational framework, aligning the organization’s vision with people’s purpose.
· A switch from experiences that focus on delight, engagement metrics, and retention scores to creating new meaningful experiences.
· Well-researched, purpose-driven innovations that fulfill a meaningful need rather than a solutions approach stemming from a team or organization’s idea.
· Qualitative data that provides real-world insights, rather than market research data that considers limited perspectives
· An inclusive approach that drives design decisions considering different philosophies and thinking styles, rather than a standard demographic persona-based approach.
· Nuanced thinking, sense-making, and holistic approaches to craft a business vision that combines social responsibility with commercial goals in a global context, as opposed to siloed thinking within an ecosystem.
Leading the Change:
Every organization aspires to push the envelope to new frontiers. Can it be done with foresight in an inclusive way that takes all kinds of people (not just the digitally mature humans) along? Can we think of ways to shift our mindset from sole profit-led innovations to an organizational mission of purposeful change?
Above all, can our organizations reorient internal philosophies and common ways of business thinking while leading global transformations in the world?
For such a purpose-driven growth shift to happen, we need voices to influence not just the ethical design decisions, but also to have holistic view of the longer horizon, with an ability combine social responsibility with commercial goals.
A Designer’s job title might not include the word “change” or even lack the empowerment, authority, or sometimes the resources to drive it. However, success lies in our ability to spot the underlying issues, and frame it in a business context powered by research and qualitative data. And interweaving them in the services and systems through collaborations.
Change is hard and might even seem impossible, but an anchored purpose with vision and persistence can energize our mission.
This is a pledge that every Designer or Design Leader must take!
Conclusion:
· The issue of digital divide is being addressed by Digitization and digital transformation at a rapid pace leading to a rise in digital capitalism.
· Since digital capitalism operates on a scalability model resting on the premise of human attention, engagement, and retention, Digitization favours the evolved set of people while leaving harmful side effects for the vulnerable groups — seen as dark patterns, addictive behaviours, and short-term solutions.
· Design maturity and literacy are of utmost importance, but it can happen only over a period. Hence, such sensitive issues must be addressed in the design itself.
· Leading this change requires new ways of business thinking rooted in core philosophies to drive a positive, inclusive, and sustainable change.
