Ethical design can impact our society
A design skill when used rightly will benefit the society but when used wrongly can ruin one too!
How ethical design can impact society? I had the good fortune early this month, during the Joint Futures conference 2019, to find out.
The Joint Futures conference was the place to discuss about Design, Design Systems, Pattern Libraries and Style Guides. This year the theme on Holistic Design Approach brought diverse people from design background to come together and look at the bigger picture. The topic arose many questions in my head and to satiate my curiosity, I attended this conference followed by a design strategy workshop. Although I volunteered in this conference, it enlightened my knowledge on the role of design thinking in our society.
For me, and many conference attendees, it was cheerful to interact with and listen to passionate keynote speakers namely Priya Prakash, Mike Monterio, Kim Goodwin, and Dori Tunstall. Their journey in design industry have introduced us all to countless new and innovative ideas.
Designing mobile apps, platforms, websites, APIs isn’t our profession but designing habits, behaviours, and new social movements. Each talk left distinct marks on us and explored how design plays a role in changing behaviour, in creating an impact, and also underlying the importance of asking the “why” questions to ourselves. Why are we working the way we are working right now in our own companies? Why are we keeping silence when speaking up is the right thing to do? Regardless if we are working for commercial mobile apps or websites or services, it is important to think about the ethics and rethink the design decisions we make everyday in our work. Design ethics are imperative and we should follow them right from the empathy phase to wire-framing to writing a content for the service to receiving customer feedback.
The two days in the conference sounded buzzed with exchanging dialogues on design practices, user-centricity, reports featuring how design affects business, so on and so forth. As a matter of fact, I managed to compile a few key takeaways from the whole experience :
1 Holistic view
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All of us, the designers, have good intentions behind our designs but at times that opens the way to hell because the unintended consequences had its haunt. We should create a better holistic future by being aware of present scenarios and keeping an eye at the future. Most importantly, analysing how can we link them with better tools, systems, and processes.
There is a need for rules and guidelines/principles in design industry, especially for digital products/services. The need arises from countless harm caused by unprotected data and privacy issues, unsafe digital products/services, misuse of online trust and so on. The design principles will help us validate if the decision made is a good decision or not. These guidelines can be formulated collaboratively by design professionals with their multifarious mastery, direct and in-direct stakeholders, and practitioners from various sectors in order to start a movement. A movement towards equality, towards humanity, and/ towards global well-being. Priya Prakash, the keynote speaker at the conference had laid an outstanding example in front of us. She started the movement, known as “D4SC — Design for Social Change” in London.
2. Communities self-actualization
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In all the leading companies, more and more hype is found on user-centric methods but its not just user experience anymore. Kim Goodwin stated that the things we are defining are human experience. In my understanding the reason could be the internal and external variables of the user that results in pleasant / unpleasant experience. Thus, not just the end-user of the product but human. Further on, the software can no longer be the design medium because they are governed by the design decisions now. The whole experience is made of decisions. Kim Goodwin very well articulated the meaning of human-centered.
Self-actualization theory from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I learnt that it’s not about actualised individuals but actualized communities for culture survival. A solution is said to be human-centered if it moves some people (who are in need) closer to self-actualization. The urge of building a diverse, cross functional team is noticed in scaling companies. The essential factors to consider when building one is to give the team clear goals and values, encourage them to apply meaningful metrics and help more humans self-actualization.
“If we are affecting someone’s fundamental needs then that should be the driving priorities of teams, product managers and so on” — Kim Goodwin
3. Ask WHY and/ Say NO
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We, the designers need to feel comfortable saying NO and asking WHY. We should have the flexibility of saying both when the appropriate situation arrives. It should be the ethical responsibility of the entire ecosystem that we design within. The pivotal reason behind asking WHY is that it provides the ability to judge if the work is ethical and saying NO gives the ability to fight, to help shape the thing we are responsible for!
As Mike Monteiro writes in his book- Ruined by design,
“A designer uses their expertise in the service of others without being a servant. Saying no is a design skill. Asking why is a design skill. Rolling your eyes and staying quiet is not. Asking ourselves why we are making something is an infinitely better question than asking ourselves whether we can make it.”
In his talk at the conference, he stated :
“ Our job isn’t to make money for ourself, although we can’t ignore that! Our job isn’t to make money for the people who hire us, although we can’t ignore that! Our job isn’t to delight the people who use our stuff, although we can’t ignore that! .. Actually, our job is to do all these things in equal measure and most importantly in a way that benefits the whole society that supports us all. Be the one who motivates others around you to be the best. “
It was an inspiring talk and made me realise the importance of zooming out. We should look at the bigger picture, think about how our work effects the whole society and not just the user experience of a few customers.
4. Respectful design
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Following on yet another topic that was highly lifted during the conference — Respectful design! When I heard this term I was a little skeptical of what it actually meant and Dori Tunstall’s talk enhanced my awareness.
She communicated that respectful design is designing future for inclusive purposes! When we design ourselves back into environment it means we value inclusivity, people’s cultures and ways of knowing. Only be approaching the community differently we can expect the outcome to be different.
During the talk, I did wonder how respectful design comes into the picture of everyday apps and services that we create in our work ? What are the required practical actions? One of the learnings from the discussion was to clearly think about the context, the product/service revolving in and around the context. Realising the bigger picture is imperative too. This also included shifting the focus from just designing a screen to thinking about the consequences the design decisions might create in future.
All-in-all, the only important thing about design is how it relates to people — quoted by Victor Papanek!
Lastly, I would definitely like to thank all my fellow volunteers in JointFutures2019 conference. The best part of volunteering is creating a friendly connection with your team mates. I am grateful to share this experience with all the lovely volunteers and attendees. All the three days were filled with early morning alarms, interesting discussions, learning new things, laughing together, supporting each other, delicious food, and dancing at afterparties.
Thank you for reading!
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Some books that were recommended in the conference :
- Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek
- “Designing for the Digital Age” by @kimgoodwin
- “Mastering Collaboration” by @gretared
- “This is Service Design Doing” by @MrStickdorn
- Wicked Problems in Design Thinking from 1992
- “Design is a Job” and “You’re My Favorite Client”, “Ruined by design” by Mike Monteiro
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