How Might Design Ethics Bring the Humanity Home to Tech?
There has never been a more important time to consider how design ethics might play a part in the design process. Responsible tech design is a core part of what drives the members in the Responsible Tech Collective to co-create and collaborate, with our aim of bringing humanity home to tech.
How might we progress Design Ethics in ourselves and in our organisations?
The Responsible Tech Collective practice values of progress over perfection, courageous conversations, holding each other accountable, making a meaningful impact whilst raising the profile of the responsible tech movement.
“Talking to people with lived experience, [means that often] the end product looks completely different, the more people that you listen to, the more opinions in the room, the wider the benefits.”
Lauren Rosegreen @ Macc
In this spirit a group gathered for the Design Ethics Event, Facilitated by Lauren Coulman at Noisy Cricket, with a panel of brilliant voices on this subject. Jane Murison from Reason Digital, Lauren Rosegreen from Macc, Rebecca Taylor from Hyper Island and Adam Warburton from Vypr. During the hour panel discussion we covered topics ranging from, ‘why is design ethics important?’, and ‘how it might become embedded in an organisation?’, to ‘what challenges are faced by engaging with design ethics?’.
How can we be a bit more ethical tomorrow than we are today?
“ How can we frame things in incremental steps, rather than a huge leap forward (…) ask yourselves, ‘how can we be a bit more ethical tomorrow than we are today?’. That seems way more achievable and far more sustainable as a practice.”
Adam Warburton @ Vypr
We are at a pivotal place where we can collectivity decide to make small steps progressing design ethics. This an open ended practice that is richer if it’s co-created, collaborative, and inclusive.
Human-centred research means that you are getting feedback in early and not wasting time and resource building a product that doesn’t work for it’s intended communities and users, important from an ethical stand point, but very useful if you are winning over the budget holder when trying to plan in this part of the product process.
Design ethics can be about the process of making a product a bit better than if it had come from one designer or team.
“It’s the most sensible risk mitigating strategy if you’re going to look at it from a business perspective.”
Lauren Coulman @ Noisy Cricket
We love a good recommendation and this event was not short of links to podcasts, books and articles. Let’s start with this from.
“If you’re interested in more on this topic I recommend this Tech for Good podcast on how do we start to question our own behaviours and attitudes when it comes to thinking about how we manage tech.
Rebecca Taylor @ Hyper Island
What might we consider beyond human-centred design?
People, society and the planet are facing challenges unlike anything we’ve seen before.
“I love the concept of more than human-centred design. This idea that we are exploring the impact our design decisions are perhaps having on the planet. Not only de-centring design from a human perspective, but from a planet, multi-species perspective.”
Rebecca Taylor @ Hyper Island
There’s three things we might consider reflecting on this comment:
- The context piece is important when we think about design ethics, how things are interconnected. Finding the Mother Tree book Suzanne Simard explores this topic beautifully.
- Looking at consequences and unintended consequences, for framing risk mitigation. There are tools to sense check this strand of design ethics.
- The flip side is what can design ethics open up, including participatory practice and community engagement.
“I wonder if you think we can have truly ethical practices/products/services (if that even exists) in a capitalist colonialist system? A system built on oppression and extraction of humans and the rest of the planet? Especially when it comes to design going beyond the human.”
Tereza Kinnert commented in the event chat
De-centring the designer from practice
Consider, where are we getting our principles, practices and ethical considerations from?
“I remember even 10 years ago accessibility might have been considered a nice to have (…) [Now] If it’s not accessible it’s not finished.”
Adam Warburton @ Vypr
Mandating aspects of design ethics is one way an organisation can de-centre the designer, making it a must have, rather than a nice-to-have.
It’s might be a frustration that designers are sharing. People want to work in a better more ethical way, but haven’t been given the space to do so. Jane Murison, former Head of Design at the BBC captured this point beautifully and talked about understanding and having compassion for those who are the journey, or taking their organisation on a journey to having space for ethical design.
“Having a bit of empathy for [the people] in the processes that we’ve having to work with.”
Jane Murison @ Reason Digital
There is an element of incremental change that may be possible and it’s important to support those who are working to achieve that. The RTC recognises that progress is more important that perfection.
Opening up the design process with participation to people with lived experience
Bringing the humanity home to tech begins when we open up the process to views from people with lived experience and include their voices in the fabric of the code that we’re weaving to make products, digital services and technology solutions.
“I would love to hear from the panel how can we make tech more accessible and inclusive?
It seems as people from marginalised background, with no or limited access to education and the digital world, or with language barries, is always off the hook, mainly as they are not very active customers due to the low income.”
Ana Godoy commented in the event chat
A hot topic for discussion, which could be summed up with this insight.
“Carry out design research in a way that’s ‘empowering and cathartic’ for the participants, rather than ‘horrible and re-traumatising’”.
Jane Murison @ Reason Digital
When we open up the process to a community, this can be done in a positive way or negative way. Lauren Rosegreen has experience of how this can work can met people’s needs and opinions can be centred or disregarded. Leaving a community with a bitter taste or feeling used.
“People of lived experience do derive great satisfaction in seeing their words being taken on board and put into action. it makes an enormous difference to a marginalised person in being included and heard on a project. it’s a major move forward… they really matter… they feel on par with everyone and not as someone who doesn’t matter.”
Linda @ Noisy Cricket and Responsible Tech Collective
Not creating thrones in meetings rooms
In the spirit of opening up the design process to be more inclusive, more participatory, we need to think about who had traditionally lead this process and what it might mean for them.
Rebecca Taylor, captured this in one snap with a comment.
“I think it’s when we’re not creating thrones in meeting rooms for ethicists.”
Rebecca Taylor @ Hyper Island
At the Responsible Tech Collective this idea of equality in perspectives is central to our practice. The role of an ethicists should not sit apart (or higher) than other roles, but be embedded in practice, an infinite journey and continuous practice.
“We’re surrounded by a world that is very tired of not having ethics baked in. The world is up for this, that is more trustworthy and kindly.”
Jane Murison @ Reason Digital
I asked our expert panel one final question for this article.
How might organisations take small steps with design ethics?
I think I’d take an org-centred view on it really — what’s the small step that is closest to what fits with their ethos and strategic objectives anyway. And how can you identify and communicate the step in familiar language?
For me working with charities, they might have a fundraising team putting pressure on to get involved in slightly ethically dodgy partnerships (say an online gambling thing, or a request to ‘approve’ a product) — the way to start discussing it is to frame it around the impact on their brand and therefore how it’ll hit their fundraising from other sources.
You’re starting a conversation about ethics but it’s grounded in metrics they care about.
Take it one step at a time. Maybe start with a product you already have & think about the opposite of your typical user. Who is this not reaching? Once you’ve identified who, it’s a great starting point before looking into why (and then subsequently getting the right people around the table to make changes).
Be really transparent with this process & keep your own WHY at the forefront. Why are you adopting ethical design? This will create ‘buy-in’ & clarity from colleagues, and also is good practice for human-centred design that will come with future products.
I think it’s in reaching to resources where you feel competencies might be missing in the org and being open to referring to them/inviting them in. So, if, for instance, your org knows its industry sector, who are the design ethicists specialising in that field? Or, are there design postgraduate students or recent postgrad alumni at Hyper Island for instance who could support/steward and offer some ears, thoughts and builds?
Also, there is always much to consider for orgs but right now many are reviewing and reflecting on efficiency and growth. So, connecting with a business priority is going to help determine the first step. For instance, ‘Growing X part of the business matters most to us because of X, Y & Z’. Ok, but extend this to a session where the team then chooses a design ethics framework and applies it to the business objective. How might this objective be optimised? What happens if the org looks at this objective specifically through the lens of optimising trust? How might IF’s Responsible Technology by Design Framework help explore trust?
There are many more frameworks to choose from (eg Design Council, etc) but if you start with designing a team session around it this might trigger and evolve into really useful ethical practices for individuals in the org and for the org itself. Don’t be afraid to start somewhere that involves testing something within an hour within a team. Who knows where it may lead? It’ll reveal learnings that you’ll be able to capture and build upon to better inform the next design ethics session and so on.
Design ethics is too broad a topic to take small steps in, and ideally needs to be broken down (privacy, sustainability, inclusion) into smaller more manageable pieces.
I’d then ask ourselves “what one thing could we do this week that would make our product do X better?” It might be privacy — create a human readable version of your privacy policy. Or accessibility — use ALT text on tweets. Or sustainability — remove unused content online.
Making small, attainable tasks enables an org to start to make progress without it being overly daunting, and means you can start to have an impact, quickly.
Thank you to everyone who came to the event, it’s been a joy to reflect back and further the discussion of design ethics in tech. Join us over on LinkedIn and Twitter to share your comments and builds for this conversation.
