What makes a design ethical?

Many people are interested in and write about ethical design. Increasing focus on the topic likely arises from public concerns related to developments in digital technologies such as social media, internet security, digital privacy, automation, deep fakes, facial recognition, and artificial intelligence in general. Although a few of these articles clearly are based on careful thinking about ethics in design, many appear to be mere opinion pieces. Some list the author’s gripes about popular software such as Facebook (Somos, 2020). Others have suggested that usable design is ethical design or that ethical design requires that designers put the needs of the user above business considerations (Vinny, 2021). Yet another has proposed a hierarchy of ethical concerns inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy has human rights as the base, the mid-section as the reduction of human effort and the apex as “delightful” human experience (Balkan, 2022). Finally, a more thoughtful theme is the notion of “dark design patterns” that cause users to act contrary to their best interests (Launder, 2016).

We have found much of the web content to be lacking in depth and usefulness. Design ethics goes well beyond ease of use, yet there isn’t a commonly shared way of considering what makes some design decisions ethical and others unethical. We need a firmer philisophical foundation on which to base our evaluation and discussion of design ethics. Determining what is ethical should be based on more than the opinions of the designer, author, or product development team. We hope to build on existing ideas and provide a fuller discussion of the ethical concerns that result from a designer’s work as well as those that arise as part of a designer practicing their craft.

Let’s start by defining the moral and ethical concerns related to design. Design Ethics will include different concerns when focusing on the user of a product compared to the designer of the product. The former focuses on impacts and consequences for the user of a product whereas the latter focuses more on how designers behave when applying their craft to produce the design for the product.

Ethics and Morality

In this article, we use “ethics” and “morals” interchangeably although subtle distinctions are often made between the two terms. Both deal with “right” versus “wrong” behavior. Some interpret ethics as dealing with rules that may be associated with specific domains or roles such as medical ethics or legal ethics. Some see morals as dealing more with personal principles that may be less dependent on context. Ethics may be viewed as more secular while morals may have a religious connotation.

In any event, the two notions are tightly interconnected and different people make different distinctions. It is interesting to note that philosophers, those people whose job is to understand the meanings of things, variously refer to the same topic as either philosophy of ethics or moral philosophy.

Philosophical Foundations

The basis of ethics and morality is avoiding harm and doing good for others. Moral philosophers have come up two ways to define ethics. One is based on rules and goes by the name, “deontology”. This approach claims that certain actions are inherently good or bad. Adherents may argue for example, that it is always wrong to steal, lie, or kill. The competing idea is sometimes called “utilitarianism”. It holds that consequences are what we should be concerned with. A consequentialist, for example, might say that telling a white lie to protect another’s feelings or stealing to feed starving children can be considered to be moral acts.

Many ethical issues are vexing and require the weighing of both rules and consequences. For example, an ethical designer should be aware of rules of the craft (best practices and guidelines) but they should also seriously consider the ultimate consequences of the applying the practices. Using utilitarianism as a lens for our analysis, we’ll first focus on design ethics issues that arise from the impacts that a design (interaction, experience, product) has on a person. How the design functions, interacts with its users, and reports on its users, creates the consequences or impacts of its use. These consequences, or impacts, can be both negative and positive with a range of magnitude in either direction. They can also be non-reversable.

We should note that design intention matters here. In our analyses of products and experiences, we focus on the intended use of the product versus the myriad of its unintended uses. We would not say that a magnifying glass has design ethics issues because it can be used to start deadly fires. However, designers have a responsibility to consider ethical issues and potential harm from their choices when a consumer uses a product in its intended use.

How a design interacts with its users provides many opportunities for unethical and harmful consequences to surface. Negative outcomes of an experience can include destruction, deception, manipulation, addiction, and discrimination. We’ll start here, though more outcomes may deserve additional attention and discussion in the future.

Destruction

Outside of weapons and construction equipment, few products create destruction as their intended outcome. Consider construction equipment as an example. For many pieces of equipment, the intended user outcome is destruction in preparation of building something new.

Let’s turn our attention to weapons for a moment. One could argue that weapons are also performing their ethically necessary duty when used for purposes such as hunting and protection of civil society. However, marketing weaponry to children, as is frequently done in gaming and with some brands of guns, opens many ethical issues.

We are also purposely not delving into the arena of government policy, which many folks, depending on their political leanings, tend to view as destructive. One could debate the intent of laws passed that ban books to keep people uneducated as ethically challenged. We will avoid debates of this sort and instead focus on product design issues.

Another form of destruction can be caused by the planned obsolecence of a product, since it essentially stops a product from operating as intended. Planned obsolescence is the planning of a product or service to become obsolete. While improvements in technology will frequently require some products to become obsolete (e.g., VHS tapes were replaced by DVDs for higher quality and convenience), many products are now engineered to last only a short time when existing technology enables them to last decades. Is it ethical to design an appliance to fail within 5 years so that its users are required to buy new or upgrade? When leveraging existing technologies can enable the product to last much longer, we consider this practice to be ethically concerning due to the impacts on the environment and costs required to replace the product that should not have failed in the first place.

Deception

Deception can surface in many ways. An obvious example can be found in advertising and marketing loans in which consumers are told that they would save money by refinancing to a new mortgage that will take longer to pay off than their original loan. While users may not pay as much monthly compared to their current loan, the extra months (or years) of additional payments will actually cost more in the long-term. This illustrates a common form of deception by not providing complete disclosure of the facts. Deceiving consumers in any way is unethical, and designers have a duty to understand how their work is being interpreted by users and the value proposition (or lack thereof in this case) offered.

Not understanding how your product usage data is leveraged to influence you at every opportunity also represents a form of digital deception. Many people don’t realize how much of their data is shared with others, including the product development team to improve the product, business teams to understand their investment, and on the extreme side, other companies that can benefit from knowing more about you. It’s not a coincidence that people are served ads for products that they were previously browsing and event chatting about on a different site, app, and device.

Sharing your data is legal and you likely authorized it when you read and agreed to the multiple pages of Terms and Conditions for an app or service. Oh, you didn’t actually read the Terms and Conditions? You are certainly not alone in this behavior. For instance, a recent ProPrivacy study showed that only 1 percent of users in their study actually read the terms and conditions, although 70% of the participants lied and claimed they fully read the agreement (Sandle, 2020). While it is legally sound to provide extensive Terms and Conditions for users to agree with prior to using a product, is this behavior ethical given that we know most users don’t read the document before agreeing? A more ethically sound design would ensure that users understand and can articulate what they are signing up for versus quickly dismissing the materials faster than they can actually read the document. Enabling this to happen is ethically questionable, albeit legally sound.

Manipulation and behavior modification

Products and services will occasionally cause us to change our behaviors, both positively and negatively. Positive behavior changes have us doing positive things for ourselves, society, the planet, etc, whereas negative behavior changes have us doing things that negatively impact ourselves, society, and the planet. As a general heuristic, positive behavior changes, as the intended outcome of a design, are ethically desirable outcomes for designers to craft. Negative behavior changes should in most cases be avoided.

Behavior can be nudged positively and negatively through product design, and designers need to understand the longer-term impact of their designs. Positive nudges can be as simple as setting the positive as the default option for users. Since people will frequently stick with the default option, selecting the most positive desired behavior as the defalut will lead to the desired user behavior.

Addiction

Many products currently provide negative outcomes as part of their use. Consider nicotine addiction and the adverse health affects caused from a product like tobacco and e-cigarettes. Decades of research has confirmed the inherent health dangers, yet many designer continue to work in the industry. This is ethically questionable from a design craft perspective. Knowing that your work contributes to the addiction and adverse health affects for your users should serve as a warning that you are operating in an ethically questionable manner.

While tobacco and alcohol addiction are the most straightforward to discuss, addiction can also result from gambling and social media, both of which have rich digital product offerings. When a company, like Facebook, ignores (and hides) data that shows harmful outcomes to its users, including teenagers, it becomes ethically questionable for designers to contribute additional work that continues these outcomes. Are we saying that all designers currently employed by Facebook should quit and walk away? No, but their designers have a duty to ensure that their work isn’t further contributing to negative outcomes, and if so, push for change. Acting like the known data doesn’t exist or ignoring the outcomes being created is equally unethical.

Discrimination

There are various types of discrimination to consider when discussing the impacts of design. As an example, consider the following types of discrimination:

• Age
• Disability
• Sexual Orientation
• Status as a Parent
• Religious
• National Origin
• Pregnancy
• Sexual Harassment

Disability discrimination provides a popular starting point for discussing the outcome of discrimination caused by design. Not accounting for people with disabilities — both situational and permanent — represents an area of ethical concern. Many digital products work for folks with disabilities, yet most do not. Even with the risk of experiencing a lawsuit, many companies still offer digital products that do not work for disabled audiences.

Designers have a duty to ensure that they are practicing inclusive design as much as possible. This ensures that more folks will be able to use and enjoy a product. Not practicing inclusive design leads to negative outcomes for a large part of your audience, and as a result, doing so is ethically questionable.

Borderline ethical issues

Interestingly, we haven’t focused deeply on ease of use as a primary source of design ethical issues. That, in part, is due to the designer’s intentions. While distraction within a User Interface and ambiguity in an error message, as examples, lead to confusion, churn, and possibly lower product usage, these become a design ethics issue only when designers knowingly provide these experiences with the intent to distract or confuse. Similarly, a design that intentionally takes control away from the user is not only unethical but also unprofessional. It’s simply bad design if confusion, deception, taking away control, etc is the intended consequence. However, that is a far different intent than maturing a product to reach product-market-fit over time. Providing a Minimally Viable Product to market and then improving the ease of use and value over time is a typical product delivery method. This becomes ethically questionable only when the product and design team knowingly ignore ethically concerning problems that surface as their improving the product.

Conclusion

Design Ethics goes well beyond ease of use, yet there isn’t a commonly shared way of considering what makes some design decisions ethical and others unethical. We’ve used utilitarianism as a lens for our analysis, which has us focusing on the consequences or impacts that result from the designer’s (or product development team’s, more generally) design decisions. From this perspective, decisions that cause negative impacts to the user should be viewed as unethical, regardless of whether the impact is temporary or reversible. This includes the products designed by a product designer, interfaces and experiences designed by UI and UX designers, as well as designers working within marketing and advertising. Encouraging behaviors with harmful impacts through advertising is comparable ethically to designing the products that cause the harm.

In our next article, we will shift our focus of analysis to the designer applying their craft to solve a problem. How does the Design field, generally speaking, determine what behaviors are ethical and unethical? Is there a governing body for designers that provides standards and guidelines for designers to follow? Should there by? We’ll address these questions and many more.

Sources

7 Ethical Design Ideas That Would Make Facebook A Better Place. (2020, April 13). UX Studio. https://uxstudioteam.com/ux-blog/ethical-design/

Launder, M. The ethics of UX: when is it good design and when are you just tricking people? (2016, April 20). Digital Arts. https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/features/interactive-design/ethics-of-ux-when-is-it-good-design-when-are-you-just-tricking-people/

Sandle, Tim. Report finds only 1 percent reads ‘Terms & Condidtions.’ Digital Journal, from https://www.digitaljournal.com/business/report-finds-only-1-percent-reads-terms-conditions/article/566127

Vinny, Cynthia. Ethical Design: How to Be a More Considerate Designer. (n.d.). (2021, November 16). From https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/what-is-ethical-design/