Above & Beyond: Normalizing design ethics into everyday practice with Sharon Lindberg
Above, like many other innovation agencies, sits in a unique position where we often use design and technology to enable better user experiences. Inarguably, improving user experience lowers the threshold of information access and allows for faster dissemination of that information. For example, this article was written in Sweden, edited in Greece, and is currently being read from one of several possible devices in practically any location in the world.
One of the consequences of this design-meets-tech type of innovation is that consumers are becoming increasingly cognizant and hyper-aware of what and how they buy. From growing concerns around data privacy to a boom in sustainable manufacturing and packaging, consumers have bigger expectations and demands for brands to be better — in other words, the era of the ethical consumer is upon us.
The role of ethics in the design process has and always will be a tricky, nuanced, and evolving subject to tackle, so we were fortunate to be joined by Sharon Lindberg for our latest Above & Beyond talk. Sharon is a designer-turned-doctoral student at Stockholm University currently researching design ethics from the perspective of designers. We spent the lunch hour discussing her findings on design practitioners’ understanding, needs, and challenges on design ethics and came away with one big takeaway we’d like to delve into further through this article — a viable way forward is to create a collective intelligence among company/team members and, therefore, the capacity for design ethics as part of your everyday design practice. Let us explain.
👥 Treating technology as a “social-technical” assemblage instead of a “morally neutral” tool
The more traditional line of thinking on this has been to view technology as a “morally neutral” tool — meaning designers should not take responsibility for how users might abuse the products they create. But, as Sharon notes, the perspective is gradually shifting towards a viewpoint that positions technology as a socio-technical assemblage — meaning that it is the designer’s obligation to take the “worst possible situation” into account when creating products. An example of this socio-technical assemblage approach was NRK Beta’s 2017 experiment trying to take the edge off of online trolls by making potential commenters take a quiz about articles before being allowed to post comments. Essentially, NRK understood that online harassment was a consequence of social media and tried to actively address the issue when designing their comment section instead of taking a “morally neutral” stance toward the inevitability of Internet trolls.
We acknowledge that this newer perspective doesn’t fully negate any potential negative effects of technology (i.e. online trolls could still take the quiz and wreak havoc on the comment sections if determined enough); however, treating technology as a socio-technical assemblage does put concrete expectations of ethical responsibility onto designers.
🗓 Design ethics as a normal, everyday practice
Arguably the biggest benefit of holding designers ethically accountable for the technologies and products they put out into the world is the normalization of design ethics as part of the design process, rather than an “add on” or “nice to have.” Sharon noted that ethics has traditionally been treated as a static checklist of right and wrongs; however, the issue with checklists is that they allow designers to be lazy and mindlessly checkboxes rather than taking context and self-reflection into account. The “ethics” checklist approach can also result in some pretty despicable business tactics, like “ethics washing,” where companies exaggerate their interest in equitable or ethical practices.” A notable example of “ethics washing” was Google’s external AI council that disbanded after only 10 days after criticism for being little more than a posturing tactic.
The best way to safeguard against this hollow performance ethics is to normalize it, which means treating ethics and anything ethics tools like checklists or guidelines as moving targets. “We should think about ethics as something continuously in motion, so what we deem to be ethical or unethical is contextual and can change over time. For instance, we used to design to encourage people to use their phones as much as possible. Now we try to avoid or minimize screen time,” explains Sharon. Essentially, checklists, guides, and other structured tools for approaching ethics can be helpful, but only if those tools are also treated as moving targets and reflect the context in which they’re being used. In this regard, it’s important to view ethics as a living thing so that designers can correct course and adapt to ever-evolving consumer trends.
🧠 Creating a collective intelligence makes working with ethics easier & normalized
Sharon noted that none of the designers she conducted interviews or workshops with as part of her research claim to work systematically with ethics — suggesting that normalized” design ethics is not currently an everyday practice for many designers. However, she did discuss a few existing approaches that can be helpful as well as a tool she’s developing as part of her studies.
Value approach: We’re only human, so our values inevitably get baked into whatever we design. What value-based design methodologies accomplish is creating an awareness of your own values, your team’s values as well the client’s values to create a better system of checks and balances, so to speak. A common example of this is Value Sensitive Design wherein empirical methods like interviews or mapping of benefits and harms to values are used to identify both direct (eg. scooter renters) and indirect (eg. people who have to navigate around scooters parked in public places) stakeholders’ values.
Speculative approach: Sharon pointed out that explicitly exploring possible outcomes through speculation and storytelling can help reveal or highlight ethical issues that might not be apparent in our current design process. An example of this speculative approach to design ethics is purposefully asking ourselves “what would terrible people do with this product?” (also known as a dark/bad persona) as a means to improve designs and negate ways in which users can abuse products.
The Actionable Ethics Questions: Sharon has been co-developing a tool with the respondents she interviews to serve as a guide for how designers can approach ethics. Tentatively called Actionable Ethics Questions, this tool is based on what design practitioners deem to be ethically problematic based on personal experiences from the field. The tool champions two main ideas: 1) that designers need to carve out space for recurring ethics discussions that work for their team/companies because 2) each team/company’s approach to ethics will be determined by their unique context, dynamics, and work hierarchy. Ultimately, what Actionable Ethics Questions gets at is creating a collective intelligence about ethics among a group of designers working together, albeit a smaller team or the entire company.
Ultimately, without a frequent discussion about ethics, tensions between value trade-offs may arise and leave areas of ethical ambiguity. Above’s Visual Designer Katharina Blust gave a great example of this, “I’m thinking of examples of censorship in comment sections. You could argue in the direction of freedom of speech while another person could argue that it’s more important to protect users from harmful content.” While Katharina is right in that both sides are valid standpoints, the specific context of online censorship and stakeholders involved will profoundly affect what is deemed ethical or unethical (i.e. if the topic of discussion was a public forum for politicians versus a homework app for kids). In this respect, the only way a team/company could even begin to create ethical consensus is to take projects case by case. In doing so, a collected intelligence supports individual and team values, hopefully, resulting in better (re: ethical) products.
Our discussion with Sharon not only highlighted the importance of normalizing ethics in our everyday design practice but also how much easier carving out the space for design ethics is than we make it out to be. After all, if design teams can do weekly inspiration shares, surely they can fit ethical discussions into their regular routines. And speaking of routines, we hope this design ethics discussion with Sharon will be the first of many, so keep your eyes open for future installments of this particular Above & Beyond series. Until then, we’d love to get the conversation started — what ethical challenges do you encounter in your design practice and what tools do you use to address them?
Above & Beyond events are held internally for the Above team. The learnings and take-aways are written by Renee Semko Gonzalez and edited by myself. Thank you to Fanny Carlsson and Sharon Linberg for their valuable contributions. I can only hope that this article (and every other article we share) offers you as many ideas and inspiration as it has our team.
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