Seizing the Means of Seduction
Design, Desire and the Ethos of Addiction
I was raised between worlds.
A first generation American, I grew up seeing various worlds co-existing at the same time. Hailing from Brazil, I was 8 or 9 when I recognized for the first time that I thought differently in different languages. I witnessed different moral codes play out first-hand in my home, and often reactions in my native Portuguese were different from the ones I had in English.
There was the culture and values of my parents’ home country vs. the American culture and values constantly at work. Negotiating these differences was a chore I was born into, and have never been able to put down. Negociando essas differencas é uma tarefa que eu nunca escapei.
Growing up, we were sold the American dream. My parents emigrated to pursue it, wealth, technology, liberty. My parents were children when a US backed 1964 coup left Brazil in a state of military dictatorship. My parents grew up with hunger, with limited technology, and my father especially, wanted it all. My brother and I were raised in the shadow of those desires.
Desire and technology were always mixed together for me as a child. The American dream was about what one could get, have and keep. House, white picket fence. The dream is desire. Unfulfilled desire is the unnamed heart of the American dream.
That dream came with a steep price tag though, and it’s been the subject of many other works, like Ta Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me. If you haven’t read it, you should.
“Most of the discussions in design forums and online channels revolve around design tools and prototyping. Why are we not discussing broader topics such as ethics, diversity and social impact in design?”
— Fabricio Teixeira, UX Designer at R/GA, (2017)
Desire in the Age of Platforms
As early as I can remember I have been around computers.
They have been my escape, my tool, my connection to the outside world. A source of fear, self-loathing and self-fulfillment, sometimes all in the same night. Desire shapes the constant interactions I have with computers. The desire to be healthy, productive, to make a positive impact in the world.
The extensive labor dedicated to surprise and delight in software design is deeply tied to the renewed power of Silicon Valley in the international markets. Design became a watershed for expanding the way we generate value through software.
Experience designers do not design for utility, or for convenience. Instead we are mandated to design as a method of turning convenience into dependence.
— Eli Silva, Product Designer
Without great design, social media may have come and gone without much fanfare. However, the design of addiction in social platforms has reshaped fundamentally the way modern humans think about what the internet is.
Social experiences, redesigned banking, and the ease of use for making large purchases at a retailer like Amazon have reshaped the modern world. These experiences have been intentionally re-tooled for repeatability, a nice and digestible euphemism for addiction.
There are entire books dedicated to building addictive products. Behavioral psychology has been used to craft an entire generation of addicts.
Uber is gaming its drivers: Uber is using behavioral psychology to shape behaviors of employees it refuses to legally accept responsibility for. Uber uses behavioral psychology to shape user behaviors of its contractors while paying them without healthcare.
Drivers for Uber have been gamed into work through intentional choices that shape behaviors.
Uber sets rates so low that the average ride is worth $11 to an Uber driver, and they wind up ‘choosing’ to drive long hours just to make ends meet, if that.
Uber has externalized major elements of its operating economics, just like industrial polluters taking no responsibility for spewing carbon into the air or pouring toxic chemicals into our waterways. But the externalities in this case are people.
Airbnb reportedly has a rent control problem: People who can make more money renting out a variety of properties can do so with few checks and balances, driving up rents in the communities where people may most need affordable housing.
The design of the sharing economy has turned everyday interactions into ways to internalize the supply-chain, turning every day conveniences or connections into transactions.
At the top of the chain these design decisions are perpetuating a deeply ironic generation of mantra-preneurs. We have created a generation of founders unwilling to recognize the ways in which they fuel the very inequality the world so desperately needs to overcome.
Experience design has pushed good design front and center, but at this point in history we have to admit that great personal uses has often come at the expense of others.
Designing Intentional Seduction
When I first became a product designer, so many of the discussions I had focused on tools and methods. The design world was enthralled with “seductive interaction design,” or “surprise and delight” as ways to generate engagement through product design. Designers, the blogosphere argued are here to create surprise and delight as a way to take design to the next level.
Design decisions like the ones in the article below are not neutral.
Lives can and do hang in the balance of our design decisions. Rogue One was a mixed hit at the box office, but one thing it did well was demonstrate the shifting ethos towards technology. You can read about that extensively in this great review. Previously, I’ve written on design ethics in The Designer’s Oath.
Design decisions shape the modern world every single day. The platforms we have made occupy a complex intersection of addiction, tax evasion, and unregulated revenue.
Understanding the Means of Seduction
The way we use technology has changed in the last decade. From the very first iteration of iTunes to today, we have seen massive changes in the way technology functions. Design has eaten the world, and produced platforms that compel behaviors across industries.
If platforms are the future, they must change.
As currently operating, platforms are designed to lock away information, commerce and exchanges behind their pay-walls. They set prices, regulate supply and demand, and create, own and operate the point of sale.
“The Uber electronic platform, whilst innovative, falls within the field of transport: Uber can thus be required to obtain the necessary licences and authorizations under national law,” the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said in a statement.
The legal fictions that undergird today’s platforms and their absentia from regulations are largely rulings of convenience, not sense. Software based operations do not in fact create a way for companies to shirk fiscal and societal responsibilities to their host societies.
Silicon Valley’s approach to tech has created centralized repositories of all-encompassing knowledge at the expense of people. The past 30 years of technology design have culminated in turning humans themselves into products.
From the commercial clip of Apple’s 1984 ad until now, we have witnessed a shift in how Silicon Valley wants to sell us tech and design.
Seducing its way into our homes through design, we have accepted that there are devices that can record and hear much of what goes on in our homes. Or, in their latest iteration, record us naked and getting dressed in exchange for fashion advice and purchases.
The business model seeking to turn the human experience into a supply chain and is largely succeeding. There’s great work by Aral Balkan looking into the subject of the camera panopticon.
Given that Big Tech has turned to collecting volumes of data on behavior and turning that data into a product, we might wonder what this business looks like at the macro level. Silicon Valley’s model is to privatize and commodify.
Who Profiles the Profilers?
It is the largely unstated goal of companies like Google to own our persons through having a digital copy of everything that makes us who we are. Profiles and their associated data create patterns that are searchable, indexed and traceable.
From spending patterns, to bank balances, media consumption, personal associations and search history, every facet of a human is digitally stored across a few enterprises. Google, Amazon and its brethren in Big Tech are ambitious to own our persons through data, and the world around us through advancing privatization of the commons. The goal then is to privatize and own the digital avatars of people.
To privatize people, it is first necessary to erase the human right to privacy and thus of the sovereign ownership of persons to their own data. Terms of service have largely served this purpose. Big Tech companies aggregate, commodify, and own in extensive and diverse ways, the means by which value is generated from the digital profile.
Seduction, left unchecked is the first most complicit collaborator in the encroaching reach of platforms and data-driven power struggles.
In its current iteration, the digital profile is a way to exert ownership and control over a human proxy. Understanding and aggregating trends, tech companies are at the verge of generating digital persons.
When you can simulate the world through tools like search and predictive analytics, you can begin to simulate people. If you can simulate people and the world, you can begin to predict and control the future.
A technology like this is easy to see the value of.
The profile any one user has on a platform, the choices we make, the emotions we express online, have all become data points ready to be consumed in building full digital persons.
The profilers will have eventually, mountains of Mechanical Turk data on which to optimize their prediction models. Simulations of behaviors on an intimate level could eventually produce predictions for any demographic on a day-by-day or purchase by purchase level of detail.
Seizing the Means of Seduction
Design has unfortunately lent itself to the manufacturing of addictive behaviors in the name of convenience, user friendliness, and revenue generation. Design has also lent itself to seduction, to overpowering human reticence, and to casual disinformation.
Experience designers do not design for utility, or for convenience. Instead we are often, especially when designing for consumers asked to design methods of dependence.
The means of production in the 21st century are seductive. Product platforms are designed to lock in, keep away, and create stores of private exercisable data stores. Seduction is the process of deliberately enticing a person to engage in some sort of behavior.
Designers are responsible for creating experiences, environments, products and systems for millions of people…With this increased influence, we must take a step back and recognize the responsibility we have to those we design for. — DesignersOath.com
Seductive interactions are all around us. From convenience to completion, everyone has triggers. While pop-psychology and behavioral psych specifically have lent themselves to an ethos of control, there is so much more we can do with what we know.
Complex relationships between users and the systems that have started to govern and operate them exist, and where there is control, there is a need for scrutiny.
Seductive interactions can and are currently helping companies charge as much as possible for a ride. Seduction, left unchecked is the first most complicit collaborator in the encroaching reach of platforms and data-driven power struggles.
These are not scenes from Black Mirror, nor am I saying we live in a dystopia, but we’re easily seduced into one. That’s the thing that makes Black Mirror scary, often the technologies showcased are seductive, pleasant, or even just ubiquitous in their convenience.
Ethics, long overlooked in design, is having a resurgence. The ethics of design are emerging, and with it, a suspicious gaze is being cast on seductive design, and the means of seduction.
Designers, this is a moment to either curb the world into compliance, or advocate for better, more human experiences.
Our industry has asked us to seduce, to entertain, to delight, and has also asked us to ignore the cost of such decisions. The time has come to seize the means of seduction, and to refuse to seduce without consent.
Software can be a powerhouse of good; useful and convenient without overt seduction or adding addictions to the human experience. The means of wealth generation has changed. People can now build wealth on ideas and the labor of software engineers instead of physical engineers or information workers.
Even at companies deeply entrenched in user research, users can be denied advocacy and a voice to make better choices on their behalf. Designers, you are those advocates.
The control of wealth means the control of culture. In every generation, how and where money works can be traced alongside the influence of ideas. We see the spread of ideas like seduction, and the idea rush to fill the demand with new knowledge. We’ve seen a generation of companies built to extract value from connection without giving much of anything back, a rather anti-internet approach to using the internet. The hypocrisy is not only glaring, it is logical.
We live in a time where wealth can be had by few at the expense of a global many. This comes by a strict set of morals about what value is and how it is attained. As designers, we have to shift the conversation about what matters.
Few are Guilty, All are Responsible
The power of design is among other things, in its ability to seduce. But Design can also liberate. We can take responsibility for the world in which we design. To do so, we must first rethink the way we think about design’s place in the world.
1. Redefine Value
I met Pamela Pavliscak this Spring. Her work is fantastic. She traces among other things, the way we design for addiction as designers. Read her work here. Pam helps us understand that among reasons design has become so addictive is how we measure things as companies. Page views, rankings, what Eric Ries called Vanity Metrics.
As a designer, the means of seduction is ever present. It’s easy to show executives numbers that go up and to the right. How we define what those numbers are is crucial. Design not just the way your users experience something, but the entire conversation around value. Thick Value, explained in the link by Umair Haque could be user to help us think outside transactions.
2. Design for Empowerment
Another way to seize the means of seduction is to redesign the power into the hands of the people who use it. Mozilla is an excellent example of how user-friendliness as an ethos can create lasting impact. Mozilla’s approach to users, their data and their use of the internet shows deep reflection. As a company, Mozilla has chosen to develop a world where the internet is “Healthy, open and accessible to all”.
Designing for empowerment means giving users the tools they need to self-actualize. Can your users achieve meaningful self-definition? Can they control their data? Are they at the mercy of advertising algorithms, or bulk data sales?
Your users need opportunity and visibility, not seduction. The opportunity to self-actualize, to make meaningful choices, to be seen and heard as human is vital to the future of design. Without these opportunities, design becomes control, a means by which we herd and corral without input or humanization.
Even at companies deeply entrenched in user research, users can be denied advocacy and a voice to make better choices on their behalf. Designers, you are those advocates.
3. Design Different
Finally, if we want another world, there are no shortcuts. We must build it one day at a time by designing another world. We must use the skills and talents we have to build systems of value outside transactions alone. We must balance the need for market value with public good.
We must bring the mindfulness we aspire to with us to the work we do in the world. As one designer recently put it, ethics can’t be a side hustle. You can’t buy Ethics credits to offset the terrible things you do at your day job.
Design for another world, design to there from the trenches of this one. Every Uber employee who touched the Greyball tool failed one of the most funamental needs of design, ethics. We cannot live in a world where design simply complies with the demands of its captors.
We must liberate design to empower, enable, and entrust humans with their own digital selves. We must pursue the rights and interests of the humans we design for, and not just as an exercise in extracting maximum value, but as an exercise in doing the right thing.
There are no more excuses; Design must be better.
If we want to feel that the world is better, or that we are not “making the world a better place” in the vein of so many TechCrunch parodies, perhaps it is time design got serious about making the world a better place.
We must build experiences that cultivate and celebrate human experiences. To seize the means of seduction, we must in fact, build methods of celebration.
I leave you with this:
“People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state — it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle…. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.”
Source: The Wisdom of Heschel
― Abraham Joshua Heschel
This year, I’m imagining where the responsibilities of Design are. I hope you will follow along and join the discussion.
