What Do We Mean By Bringing Home The Humanity to Tech?
Living in a world where value is measured in productivity, profit and economic growth, it’s hard to imagine that the tech industry (in its current guise) is here to fulfil people’s wants and needs, and not the other way around.
Social media platforms that profess to connect people are far more effective at connecting advertisers with potential consumers. Content designed to educate and inform in fact polarise opinion on account of algorithms that show us what we’d prefer to see. e-commerce platforms which are designed to make our buying the goods and services that make our lives more convenient use dark patterns to encourage us to spend that little bit more than we really want to.
As organisations, we need to acknowledge that a lot of our solutions are digital, yet , we don’t want to make people addicted to their screens.
Ed Cox @ Reason Digital
It’s this world that the Responsible Tech Collective — a Greater Manchester-based community of pioneers and practitioners working to create a more equitable, inclusive and sustainable tech industry — are questioning. Instead, we’re exploring what might happen if we put people first when it comes to the creation of technology?
The post-covid digitisation of society has meant a digital by default approach, as opposed to human by default approach, with tech at its core. Some people and organisations are making millions of pounds out of this, and increasingly, the digital is getting one over on the human.
Dave Kelly @ GMCA
Within tech organisations, the opportunity to put people first is myriad, starting with the internal policies, processes and practises that the industry engages in to provide people with the products and services that, hopefully, deliver profit.
In practising responsible tech, the idea is that in centring people’s wants and needs, tech solutions are more likely to be successful. In considering design ethics and data ethics too, organisations are less likely to need to unpick issues around transparency and consent, for example, or wellbeing and dark patterns, of which broken consumer trust costs more to address in the long run.
Think about the fifty plus age bracket. People are receiving rolling advertisements for funeral care plans. It’s ok to have the occasional reminder, but not a deluge, please. If these adverts were targeted on terrestrial television, it would feel blunt. The computers only do what they’re told to do, with moneyed businesses at the helm. Humanity must first have the tech…
Linda @ Noisy Cricket
The often unintended consequences of organisations decision making are directly influenced by who is making decisions. In predominantly employing white, straight, heteronormative and middle-class men, the industry has blind spots and is missing out on opportunities to create products and services that have the potential to reach and appeal to wider groups of users.
We have to make sure we consider our own cognitive biases, even when the intention is good. Who even decides what is good? Take nudge theory, for example. Is it okay to nudge people to donate blood and behave in certain ways. How might we ensure we’re not becoming what big tech is becoming in terms of pushing our own biases?
Ed Cox @ Reason Digital
Considerations around usability and accessibility, not to mention affordability and sustainability for those less able to afford internet access, software or smartphones, means different experiences and perspectives on the world are necessary to make tech be as effective as it can be. Yet, organisational culture, even where inclusion is prioritised, often negates diverse people’s ability to influence decision making.
In the Responsible Tech Collective’s work in Ethnic Equality in Tech, project partners Honeybadger and Diverse & Equal found that despite the benefits to organisations addressing structural challenges around representation and progression, cultural issues like bullying influencing belonging and personal apathy amongst leadership in addressing inequality, diverse perspectives aren’t always heard.
Achieving diversity in the tech world is a challenge. If we want to put people first in the industry, we need to have diverse organisations, made up of different people with different lived experiences asking different questions, so we can make the best product that can be.
Chelsea Maher @ Culture Shift
For people and organisations alike, its a cause for concern, especially when you consider that people of colour are often overqualified for the work opportunities they’re afforded, and beyond the reputational costs of products like Google images tagging black people incorrectly, think of the opportunities for exciting new functionality and features, or products and service innovation that’s being missed as a result?
Organisations that are diverse are 50% more innovative. McKinsey found when an organisation is gender diverse, they are 21% more profitable, but when we add ethic diversity to this mix, it’s 35% more profitable. Yet, it’s not just businesses where diversity is a win. The potential benefit to the UK from full representation of ethnically diverse individuals across the labour market is £24 billion in additional GDP a year.
Annette Joseph @ Diverse & Equal
The same principles work for engaging people in communities too. In overlooking the needs of marginalised and often vulnerable groups in user research or discovery, the industry is missing out on opportunities not just to avoid drop-offs or abandoned baskets, but to create products and services that inherently address inequality, and create more trust as a result.
Bringing home the humanity to tech, therefore, means looking inward, to the cultural practices and structural processes we engage in, and whether we’re willing to invest upfront in people and responsible tech decision making to avoid greater costs and improve product performance longer term.
Think about how you engage [vulnerable] people, and the consequences of their experiencing any slight error online. For people in the job club, for example, it can be very frustrating and leave people in tears when you’re at risk of sanctions. The fact that people have had to up skill at the Job Centre, quick sharp, to get the money they need to live… Some people pick it up instantly, but some people need to take their time. While digital and tech is great, it’s not everyone’s jam. How do you make it so usable and intuitive it feels analog?
Linda @ Noisy Cricket
It means uncomfortable conversations, challenging received wisdom about how we create digital products and services and use data. It means diverse voices leading decision making, and engaging people we don’t usually consider during the creation process. Often, this comes from conscientious people, working within teams, and increasingly from leaders, who recognise that beyond the behaviours we want to enable and incentivise, there’s a much bigger picture to consider.
Right now, we’re missing imperfections in the way we work. The tech sector has taken us down the route of cult following the paradox of productivity. We often miss the fact that people are sentient, whole beings. We can’t just focus on the bit of them that interacts with your product or what works for your organisation. We can’t expect people to show up as robots and not be affected by the tech we create
Hera Hussain @ Chayn
To put people first requires a wholesale cultural shift within the tech industry, and in Greater Manchester, where we have discomforting levels of poverty and a diverse local population, the opportunity to leverage our socially progressive history as investment in the tech industry scales provides a unique opportunity.
With values-led organisations from the Co-op to Thoughtworks, public sector leaders from GMCA to the BBC and myriad organisations like Open Data Manchester and Digital Advantage progressing thinking and offering innovative solutions to the industry, we’re in a unique position to create policy influencing and practice shifting solutions, all to help the industry put people first.
With Manchester we are lucky to have a small, but well-connected tech industry but with a loud voice. We have a huge opportunity to explore what the city and region is doing, funnel our energy into smaller-grass root organisations so that they don’t get left behind and ensure that our growth adapts to the city rather than the city adapting to the growth.
Hera Hussain @ Chayn
Fancy joining us? You can find out more about the Responsible Tech Collective on Medium here and on social media here diverse and find out more about our work and how you can get involved.
