The whataboutery of design
In political discourse and philosophy, ‘whataboutery’ refers to when someone points out hypocrisy in an attempt to discredit an opponent, not dissimilar to the concept of ‘ad hominem’.
“Yes, but Donald Trump can’t claim X person is wrong because he did it too!”
When I first heard it, I interpreted it as something else which doesn’t have a discreet term in design world, but I wish it did. For now I’ll use the same term.
‘Whataboutery’ in design is when a meeting or creative process gets derailed by thought and discussion about issues and use cases that aren’t currently pertinent to the process.
“Yes, but what if 100 people used it at the same time! It would be a nightmare!”
(pointless discussion ensues)
In the above case, discussion isn’t relevant to an as-yet unbuilt thing. 100 people using thing at the same might may well be ‘a good problem to have’, and you don’t need to design or think about that now.
The trick is to catch those whataboutisms that are actually relevant. Most don’t mean a thing to where thing is now, but some are genuine gotchas. Only good reasoning can help you spot them. Particularly sticky are those that have an ethical dimension: maybe one is a real problem, and mean you shouldn’t attempt whatever it is you’re attempting.
What about if someone used our sexuality detecting face-app to out someone without their consent?
This is a whataboutism you need to worry about, because it’s potentially life-destroying, and rather likely.
I wonder if many arise from people’s natural fear or the new, or desire to bias to the status quo. The thing that I see most often in whataboutery is trying to serve everyone. Whatever it is you’re doing, focus mostly on the critical path to begin with: what is the journey you’re taking 80% of the people on? Whatabouting on the 20% will likely hinder your early work.
The problem is that there’s no end to the whatabouts. You can spend eternity thinking about all the maybes, the this’s, the that’s. Meanwhile, you’ve lost valuable time you could have spent on the core problem, finding the right answers.
