Designers should redistribute power, not consolidate it
Design practice is the 21st century’s way to consolidate established power.
I have a feeling that design is (and for few years now) THE discipline every business and government is talking about and looking to integrate into their organisation. It’s such a trend that many management consultancies have acquired their own design agency now and new jobs are adopting a design approach: policy designer, content designer, strategic designer, learning designer, to name a few.
Truth be told, I understand why: We need empathy. We need to understand why people do the things they do and how we can facilitate the interactions between all the entities that our societies are made of, to create virtuous outcomes. We need people who can navigate an increasingly polarised world, set upon by political extremism, rising levels of inequality, cancel culture and self-centricity (to name a few). We need people to facilitate discussion, create mutual benefits and consider broad consequences, such as including the environment, workers, non-users, etc. that can be affected by a service or a product. A very good exemple in that direction is the Manifesto for Society Centred Design.
Yet something keeps coming to my mind and it does scare me. From my understanding of history, professions and disciplines that are highly regarded tend to be the ones enforcing power (knights, teachers, policy strategists, bankers, film-makers, advertising gurus, and so many others at some point in time).
Byung-Chul Han highlights how societies under neoliberalism are moving from violent enforcement of power to indoctrination and soft power. With design practices being so widely spread today across public, private, for profit, not-for-profit, and other organisations, it’s important to reflect on what our role is, as designers, in perpetuating structures of power.
When talking the talk isn’t enough, let’s nudge the walk
Principles, processes, and tools used by any designers (architects to digital UX designers) are great resources to gain empathy with the people we’re designing for. This knowledge is power. It allows designers to understand how things work, how people think, how they behave, what mindsets drive them. That’s great! But it seems we’re using this understanding, this power for the ones we’re designing with, not the ones we’re designing for, and ultimately replicating the structure in place, either consciously or unconsciously.
Power lies in the hands of the ones who control friction
It always amazes me just how much easier it is to spend money than it is to earn it in the first place.
Friction is a very good way to empower or take power away from someone. Frictionless experiences, as traditionally understood, are designed to reduce friction in the interests of the seller, not in the interests of the consumer. 1-click ordering, buy now pay later methods, fast deliveries, Amazon Go, social logins, etc. all serve to reduce the reasons not to buy a product or use a service, but provide no opportunities for pause or reflection on whether you actually want/need to buy and use something.
Yet when it comes to supporting people, to access loans or benefit from state support, returning products, reading T&Cs, manage cookies on a website, cancel a plan or delete a social media account, friction is everywhere. Many documents are required, multiple appointments are needed, multiple screens and dialogue boxes will ask you if you really want to delete your account, “NO BUT ARE YOU SURE?”, “maybe you could just pause it?” And the cherry on top, sometimes the logic has changed: the confirmation and cancellation buttons’ colours and/or places are reversed to what people are used to.
(for more information, I invite you to read this amazing article about dark patterns in UI copy)
A recent and almost perfect example of all of this was during the GameStop Short Squeeze, where frictionless investment lead to regular (internet) people being able to tamper in the financial wellbeing of hedge-funds, only for the app that provided this frictionless experience (Robinhood) to place restrictions on the stocks people could buy (selling was, of course, unaffected).
Power lies in the hands of the ones who control knowledge
There’s an imbalance in knowledge. How much do we know about Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other platforms? How do these work? What do these do? What their revenue models are? In comparison, how much do Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. know about their users? There’s a fundamental lack of literacy in the way our societies, companies, governments, services, and products work. As designers we often only communicate the outcome of a service: connect with people around the world; get your parcel delivered tomorrow; manage your bank through messenger; etc. But at what cost?
We never communicate the non-financial costs of our services. We don’t clearly communicate that the algorithms we design are radicalising people because of business models we design algorithms for; we don’t communicate that express deliveries are more polluting than standard deliveries, nor that today’s delivery systems are so efficient that people actually might get their parcel in couple of days anyway.
Sometimes, we do communicate it, but when we do we introduce friction. We write information in small print, talk fast at the end of the radio advert, we submerge information in such a vast amount of content that no one cares to read it, we make it understandable only by people literate in law, technology or even science (why are we talking about “excipient E414” rather than saying “Acacia”?).
Power lies in the hands of the ones who control potency
As explained in Futurability, friction and ignorance lead to impotence. There is no way for people to be empowered if the systems, services, products and experiences we’re designing are ultimately making people impotent. As designers, we need to advocate for the people, not only the consumers. We need to design systems, services and experiences that understand people in their context, not our’s.
As facilitators, we have to reflect on what is it that we facilitate
- We need design teams to not only be cross functional but to also be diverse and inclusive; with designers and researchers of colours; designers and researchers from different backgrounds; designers and researchers with different and non-conforming identities
- We need to consider the friction we introduce in a service and reflect on who benefits from it
- We need to introduce friction that benefit users and reduce friction to benefit users (such as summarizing the key points of the T&Cs)
- We need to support users’ education so they can take informed decisions
- We need to consider solutions that understand people in their own context, not just in the context of usage of the said solution (for instance, designing systems that don’t require people to get an address and a bank to get a job, to get an address and a bank)
- We need to build literacy, not only about how to use something, but also about how something works, its limits and what it costs
- We need to design for solutions to be hacked by its users so they can reach THEIR goals, rather than asking people to have certification on their resume or to pass tests on a professional social network
If you have anything to add to the list of things we should do as designers to make sure we redestribute the power, feel free to reach out to contribute!
Shout out to Eamonn Lavery for helping me in writing that piece :)
