The Role of Design Ethics and 2017’s Unintended Consequences

This year clearly raised our awareness of design’s unintended consequences on society.

This post is based on a talk for Evenings at the Loft, which lead to a great discussion summed up here by Chelsea Hassler. You can view more visuals in my slides.

In spite of the challenges, this is an opportunity to better think about the problems we are solving.

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), society in 2017 has been particularly anxious about technology, and designers have had to think more deeply about the right balance between human input and automated technology.

For me, the dialogue came to a head in attending the Information Architecture Summit in Vancouver. Entitled, Designing for Humans, the conference covered the role of design in an increasingly automated world.

The most impactful moment of the conference came with back-to-back sessions from designers Carol Smith and Kaleem Khan on AI that could not have been more opposite in their approach and conclusions.

Carol’s talk aimed to reassure us that AI was still in its infancy, much like a baby, and was helping to automate basic procedures, with ongoing human input. Whereas Kaleem showed us the dangers already present in AI today, including issues concerning security, privacy, and who has power over technology.

While Carol’s core example centered on the wonders of automated technology in the medical field and helping cancer patients, Kaleem showed us the X-47B, an unmanned combat air vehicle that can land on an aircraft carrier on its own. Kaleem asked us to consider the way we would make a decision to wage war against other humans when we no longer have to sacrifice human lives on our side.

This is an specially scary thought when you consider that Donald Trump is currently leading decisions within our country. And how did Donald Trump get there? Some say, with the help of Facebook.

The popular social network was in the spotlight this year, both for its role in the presidential elections and the spread of Fake News, as well as the ongoing worry that it can be potentially damaging to our brains and is contributing to the erosion of our self growth. In this case, it is not only the automation of Facebook’s algorithms, but also the consequences of the platform’s scale upon society.

Likewise, AirBnB has been subject to criticism worldwide for the growing sense that it is participating in the gentrification of local neighborhoods and in bringing in too many tourists to once local-only places. In my travels to Lisbon and Barcelona this year, I saw a growing anti-tourist sentiment that was fueled by the aptitudes of today’s tourists and AirBnB’s effect on rent and the cleanliness of their neighborhoods. Not without a sense of irony, I reflected on this while stepping out of my AirBnB lodging in a Lisbon neighborhood that seemed outside of the tourist area but was full of AirBnB guests.

With the negative consequences of technology at scale becoming more apparent, 2017 also shined a light on design ethics and the evolving role of design on society.

Key among leaders of a growing movement towards design ethics is Tristan Harris, a former Google employee who now runs Time Well Spent, an organization that warns against the dangers of the attention economy, and makes designers responsible for intentionally “hooking” users into addictive behaviors. Tristan was featured on 60 Minutes and numerous other TV shows and publications.

Joe Edelman, the founding CTO of Couchsurfing, and also a key contributor to Time Well Spent, is writing furiously on “a new vision for virtue,” as well as giving us valuable thoughts on the metrics measuring the success of digital products, as he attempts to “move from metrics of engagement to metrics of personal meaning.”

Rob Girling, CEO of design studio Artefact, published a great piece on Fast Company, entitled Beyond the Cult of Human-Centered Design, which also speaks to design’s unintended consequences and provides a set of guidelines to become “humanity-centered designers,” who ask deeper questions and think more broadly (as a system) and more long term.

As design continues to expand its role on business, technology and society at large, its responsibilities and scope of questioning also becomes larger.

Which brings me to an important and growing disciplinary intersection between Philosophy and Design, where design can learn, not just about human behavior, and the cognitive implications of our dealing with technology but also about meaning itself.

At the highest level of human inquiry is questioning the nature of existence and the underlying fabric of reality. What is it? What can we know about it, if anything at all?

While today’s post-structural world seems to think in terms of practical and concrete thought that is not bound to a metaphysical point of view, we nonetheless bring our own ontological views and biases on the nature of reality into the discussion.

My hope is that designers will start looking at the philosophical dialectic and bring in insights from transcendental realist thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Thomas Aquinas; just as much as they do from idealist thinkers like Descartes, Kant and Hegel; as well as post-modern thinkers like Derrida and Heidegger. I have laid some of this groundwork in my talk on Philosophy and Design which I will keep refining.

We may be in a secular age, but as the philosopher Charles Taylor points out, the history of ideas is not one of steady progress, but of changes that brings positive contributions as well as meaningful losses. We must continue to decipher what is a gain and what is a loss worth recovering.

Thus the dialectic is important, and in an extremely simplified form, it deals with the variance of ideas about the fabric of reality, whether it’s ultimately pure material phenomena, some transcendent spirituality, or a fully transcendent God. The thought of which lands us in whether our minds are not that different from that of a machine, or do we in fact possess a transcendent soul, not imitable by technology. Our thoughts on this shape how we design our technologies and ultimately our world, specially in light of a desire to augment our own consciousness, while designing machines to have a consciousness. What is consciousness? Do we have a soul or are we just reducible to pure material phenomena?

2017 was a difficult year for a world dealing with increasing complexity and polarization, a year that shined a lot of light into societal problems, and one that also showed the progress of design in both its potential for good and for bad.

To my delight, designers are embracing the expanded role of design and starting to evangelize about how to use our empathy and planning toolkits to better deal with unintended consequences and provide a more humanistic outlook to our ambitions for scale and growth.

And so we grow as a practice, from worrying about our process, to starting to work on a larger design system, to understanding that our work has a direct impact on society.

Designers today are in a great position to design a transformed society that is better apt to deal with our modern problems.

It is important that we nourish ourselves in our own design practice, but also take away lessons from history, the soft sciences of sociology, anthropology and psychology, and of course, metaphysics and philosophy. By combining our toolkit with humanity’s best thinking since the dawn of civilization, we can create a society we are proud to have designed, with more intention and wisdom.