Designing for the Unintended
For this week’s assignment, I chose to listen to the ‘Designing for the Unintended with Jess Majekodunmi’ podcast episode. In this episode Jess talks, amongst other things, about ‘Conscientious innovation, which is described by the host as an oxymoron. Now why is this an oxymoron? Simply put Innovation is most of the time technology pushed and we delegate power to technology systems. In turn, therefore, in many cases innovation disregards ethics and ‘consciousness’ in order to facilitate technological advancement and ethical systems tend to be overlooked entirely. Recently, however, the power of technology has been more openly challenged due to the negative impact of technology and innovation, as discussed in the podcast episode.
Every innovation and every technology has intended and unintended uses, and its unintended consequences can be harmful. An example of an extremely alarming unintended consequence in technology has to do with google’s search engine algorithm. Google’s search engine will provide results based on popularity which will thus theoretically provide an unbiased product. When searching for white girls and black girls, the results for black girls are racist, pornographic, and violent. Although Google is not innovating with this intention, the consequences are still extremely harmful. Because Google failed to understand the inherent racism in society, they are not able to produce an ethical and Conscientious product. “Human centered design is common sense, yet essential in doing meaningful work”, and in this case google’s product was not optimal as they did not have its users at the center of its design.
I also found it interesting that Jess clearly separates conscientious vs responsible. Conscientious design is more proactive rather than reactive reactive. It is intentional design rather than compliance. In google’s case, they were responsible in that they did not blatantly attach any bias towards their product but were not conscientious as they did not actively aim to weed out the negative consequences of their innovation.
Below is a graphic I made of the cyclical nature of racism which would have been perpetuated by google if not for conscious design.
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVP9sWByg=/?share_link_id=437545616224
