The Cynic’s guide to designing for Social good

Learn how to fix things that are wrong by being angry.

“Why are you so cynical and angry?”

When we ask her this question she is used to respond: “Why on earth are you not?”.

Bex has been working in technologies for about 15 years, 7 of which on designing services, products and tech that will help create positive social change:

• She has created resources for tutors to teach basic digital skills to those who are being excluded from important online services because they don’t have that skills.
• She worked with an organization that wants to encourage people to consume less technology so that we aren’t creating dangerous landfills (referring to Making your product experience unique).
• She also worked with an organization that is determined to reduce human trafficking that happens online by working with some of the internet’s major platforms.
• And she worked on web apps designed to help rape survivors through the painful process of reporting their assault to the police.

This is her day-to-day work. She gets angry sometimes that these problems even exist in the first place. Being angry genuinely made her better at everything (except making friends, she said 🙂).

Here’s why.

“If you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all”

Rebecca agrees at some level with her nan’s quote. For example, she wouldn’t walk up to someone and say: “your hair is really crap!”.

There are many things that can piss us off, we can’t go around complaining about them all and it wouldn’t be appropriate.

However, when it is about something important we should stand out and express our anger. Because without this kind of attitude we end up with inertia, then nothing happens, nothing changes.

To illustrate this she created the flowchart of “meh”

Because no one wants to be “meh” they give positive feedback, meaning the outcome (that terrible product) still exists.

Instead, what we want is the angry innovation flowchart

You see something that sucks and either you research and design something better or you speak to someone who can research and design something better. Outcome = the thing doesn’t suck anymore, Amazing! (its scientific ;-))

But it’s not appropriate to get angry at everything.

To help us through this, she developed the Venn diagram of helpful and appropriate anger

“We should standing out and express our anger (…) but we can’t get angry at everything.“ – Bex

The first circle is anger at an issue (that alone is useless). You need to know about the subject (get angry without understanding the problem space means get angry for the wrong reasons) AND you have to take action to help (or what’s the point?).

“What even is good?”

Josh, is the kind of guy she often meets after giving a talk and this is what he’ll say.

This is the kind of person who works in tech or just graduated from university and thinks he’s ever so smart. He loves to challenge you because it makes him feel big. According to Bex, there’s always a Josh and she is used to answering: “shut up Josh”.

Moral philosophy is a confusing place.

There are different models of outlining what constitutes a moral or ethically “good” decision. According to the Oxford English dictionary, there are over 20 ways to describe “good”.

“I’m not your mum” – Bex

We all learn at a very young age the basic premise of good and bad. We know deep down what’s right or wrong. But we may try to ignore it because of some underlying guilt about the project that we are working on. Or maybe we just like money and success (it’s ok, everybody like it 🙂). The first step for recovery is recognition.

We can all agree that we should be doing less harm with the work that we do.

Power

Bex focuses a lot of her thinking on it. Who has it? who doesn’t? who’s left behind because of the work we are doing?

Most of the time we make people already comfortable and more comfortable. However there are many examples of products that have failed society: Airbnb, Spotify, etc.

Instead she wanted to talk about 2 projects that she worked on.

Project #1: sexual health clinic

They wanted to encourage teenagers to learn more about their sexual health.

They needed more time in the clinics though to focus on those who needed more help and support than others. So they worked with them to create an online triage and advice system that was designed to reduce those face-to-face visits.

During the research and design phase, they identified a few edge cases. In a commercial product, those edge cases would be discarded as they would not provide enough financial ROI.

In the social good sector though where profit is not the main driving point, those edge cases are often those who need help the most. So they become crisis cases.

“It becomes our responsibility to make them safe.” – Bex

One crisis case was one of a 12-year-old asking for a pregnancy test.

They could just give them a pregnancy test and carry on with their lives. But something illegal has happened for a 12-year-old to become pregnant. And it’s illegal for good reason.

Bex says that it’s our responsibility to protect this user. But she has seen plenty of people find excuses for not designing for this sort of user. Saying “It’s not my problem” or blaming things.

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not.” – The Lorax

What we create shapes the world that we live in.

Project #2: drugs and alcohol addict support center

They’d reached their building capacity. They couldn’t support anyone else but they knew more people wanted help, so they looked to tech as a way to open up and scale their service.

The most valuable thing in this center was the peer-to-peer support network where the people in the center were helping each other. They wanted to see if they could replicate this online. So they set up a WhatsApp group and they added some of the people being supported by the center to that group. They deliberately chose those who are in the later stages of recovery and therefore less at risk. So a researcher watched what happened in that group over a few weeks and they found that safeguarding was key.

These online spaces needed to be moderated just in the same way as the offline spaces do. It was important that 2 people having a bad day should not be placed alone together in the chat depending on the individual, this could have been a suicide risk.

People could die without safeguards in place.

Money

We needed money in order to make an impact. And we need to make sure that the products we build are financially sustainable.

It would be incredibly irresponsible to create that support app and run out of suicide risk, they would run out of funding and they must shut the app down.

But sometimes there is a clash between:

• what can create the most impact
• what can make a sustainable product

For example: we could build a tech platform that could help charities help people. We could sell on the use of the tech platform to the charities either by selling intellectual property or by creating the software to be a paid-for service and charging for its use.

Whilst this might increase the chances of the product being sustainable by adding a revenue stream, what we’re also doing is decreasing the number of people who can use it. If charities can’t afford that fee we could charge at the point of access for the user.
But again, what about those people who can’t afford to access it? We’re restricting the use of the app, potentially by those who need it the most.

Another scenario could be: working for a charity for free because of a social good project to get PR. But the consequences are: we don’t prioritize them, and we cut corners because we’re not paid for it.

Another scenario: we were only given a small grant and we can’t afford to put it in the extra time needed to make a product safe. Money might mean that we do the bare minimum for maximum profit. It might mean that we do what funders tell us to do even if it is not the right answer.

Maybe we don’t create a solution for this 12-year-old because the budget doesn’t stretch. Maybe we’ll release that addiction recovery app without the right safeguarding.

“Sometimes we make the bare minium for maximum profit” – Bex

We might say “This would never happen, who would do such a thing?”. But She has seen each and every one of those examples play out in real life.

“We could have saved the Earth but we were too damn cheap”

Bex ends her talk with this Kurt Vonnegut quote because “I’m a massive cliché” she said.

She 100% agrees with her old friend Tom who says: “People are the problem”.
She moved to do evil in the commercial sector spending her days making rich people richer in the social sector — may be naively — thinking the world would be full of fluffy bunnies and unicorns and rainbows and we would all be best friends.
For her reality is that money is an issue, another one is ego.

She has seen people’s egos ruin so many projects. Those who she calls “privileged entrepreneurs” thinks that the idea will save the world. They think they can create an app for raising money for those who are homeless without actually understanding the people who are homeless and without ever speaking to a homelessness charity who’ve spent decades understanding the problem space.

The same entrepreneurs compare the refugee experience to a backpack experience. They just focus on QR codes to be scanned, or dating-style apps where you can choose the homeless profile to which you give money.

We think that charities are not very well organized, etc. It’s wrong, we must rethink our perception of them.

The way charities work is different among countries, she recommends the Ted Talk “The way we think about charity is dead wrong” by Dan Pallotta to change our mindset.

Egos and bias are things we have in human nature, it’s normal to have them. But it can be hard to receive feedback because of these things.

She advises us to create safe spaces to have critical discussions like:

• Red team to avoid making bad decisions
• Identify negative consequences your product might have on the world so you can stop it.
• Make ethical specifications (as there are technical or functional ones)

There are tools, conferences, etc, to make sure our products are more ethical. According to the speaker, we have no excuse to not do it.

Key takeaways

• Design for human errors assuming the worst like in aircraft design. Assuming it’s our default instinct.
• Think about protective business models like social enterprises, B corp cooperatives or charities.
• Add friction when needed instead of being the constantly frictionless focus. E.g. stop people from spending money on gambling apps.
• Understand the people behind the problem

Yes, I can be a cynic, I can be angry. But I’m angry because I have hope. I have hope all that things can be better… if we get angry at fix things. – Bex

About the speaker

Rebecca Rae-Evans – Chief Design Officer @Snook

Rebecca Rae-Evans has a varied and extensive 15-year background in research and user-centered design, working with blue-chip clients on award-winning digital projects. For the past 6 years, Rebecca has transitioned into working exclusively on tech for good projects. Her focus has digital transformation, lean research, service design, and product innovation for social good.