What does it mean to be an ethical designer in 2022?
Aashish Solanki, CEO & Founder of NetBramha Studios is a trailblazing design entrepreneur with 15+ years of rich experience in reshaping several Fortune 500 companies & startups across the globe. Under his leadership, NetBramha Studios has impacted 200+ brands across 25 countries & 20+ industries, and a billion+ happy users. He is also the Founder of DesignDay.co India's leading curated monthly designer meetup. A staunch advocate of design thinking & HCD, he is a regular speaker at global design conferences & events.
Design ethics deals with anything & everything that establishes a moral & responsible relationship between a design/product & the end user. It's not just about deciding how “good” a design is, but also how much “goodness” the design entails. To the user, their ecosystem, & the society in whole. Being ethical on the papers is easy. It's easy to say that you are a staunch advocate of design ethics. Implementing the fundamental principles of ethical design in a practical sense is a totally different ballgame. Pressing deadlines, demands of the clients, & many such real time issues can make sticking to design ethics a major inconvenience. At this juncture it's important to do a reality check on these parameters
Ethical design structures - Instead of treating ethics as an isolated concept in design practice, make it an active & thriving element to your daily practice. Whatever you do, how you plan stuff, how you interact with your stakeholders, where you put your foot down, & the likes - ethics have to be an integral part of all of these & more.
Ethical organizational practice - If your organization’s mission & vision are not connected to design ethics, it's time to rethink a lot of things. Additionally, it's equally important to have organizational values match with your personal values as a designer.
Ethics & assumptions - A lot of unethical design practices & outcomes seep into the work when we are led by assumptions. Break this cycle by being extremely skeptical of ideas, beliefs, & notions that power your work every single day.
Own your mistakes - Moving one step ahead from identifying your assumptions, it's also important to actively seek what mistakes you made/can make, as its the only way to dive deep into the “unknown unknowns” (the lesser known, more elusive cousin of the “known unknowns”)
Ethical design KPIs
Exploring yet another important segment of ethical design, what critical parameters serve as ethical design evaluation criteria, we have listed down a few those here
- Ethical design yield products with easy & high usability
- Ethically designed products are accessible & inclusive of needs of every type of user
- Ethical designs take privacy issues seriously
- Ethical designs are persuasive, but not addictive
- Ethical designs don’t aim to disrupt users’ attention
- Ethical designs rank high on sustainability
- Ethical designs tend to improve societies & ecosystems
Ethical design & the social dilemma
The irony brewing between mega tech companies promoting their platforms as fundamental to the right to choose & then committing serious data breaches is one amongst many significant design ethics issues in the current day & age. The western political thought & philosophy considers individual freedom & freedom of speech/choice to be of utmost importance. Till recent times, the biggest threats to democracy were facist dictators & fundamentalist groups. But today, a different kind of ubiquitous threat looms around the world - the invasion of privacy, addiction to digital platforms, & trading of human attention.
And a lot of this has to do with design ethics - or rather, the paucity of the same in building design systems & product thinking methodologies. What’s the driving force behind design decisions? Is it empowering users with a seamless global connect or manipulating their decisions, hijacking their attention spans for a few more clicks?
From doom scrolling to Twitter hate to misinformation wildfire - being “online” or “plugged” to this newly unleashed digital macrocosm is ironically curtailing our individual & collective freedoms. To the massive extent that Nomophobia, the sudden feeling of anxiety & restlessness on being away from your phone/laptop, is now prevalent in more than 53% of the general population.
Proponents of this such product thinking methods might whitewash it by calling it engagement or product stickiness, at the end of the day all of these are fuelled by factors that lie in stark moral gray areas. This is where going back to the basics of ethical design & its KPIs can aim to trigger some change.
Role of a designer in all of this
Designers these days are not just designing interfaces.
They are designing how people will ultimately connect with other people & business to get things done. Much like their namesake, designers are actually designing (& directing) the way in which our civilization is moving.
And every bit of it counts. From something as simple as how a notification pops up on a device ( colors, emotional triggers, frequency, messaging, tone, emojis, icons & so on) to things with massive repercussions like privacy terms, behavioral changes, data breach & the likes are at the helm of the designers.
And hence, to quote Stan Lee “With great powers, come great responsibilities” .
To make a contextual addition to this, “With great powers, come great responsibilities, & a greater need to be ethical”.
The big battles have to be fought by you, the designers. So where does one start? Here are a few workable basic points to begin with
Design ethics evangelism - Very important to put your knowledge & insider’s information out there to communicate to both design & non-design communities the importance of design ethics & the dangers of unethical designs.
Practice what you preach - Lead the revolution by practice, not just with words. How you personally react to notifications, social media usage, addiction/heavy usage of digital platforms, & so on will take you one step closer to putting this in your work.
Own ethical design practices - In stakeholder meetings, in the research-strategy phase, in prototyping - every step of your design process the concept of design ethics must be addressed.
These are just some of the stepping stones towards establishing a culture where ethics & design are so closely intertwined that with time they become synonymous. The idea behind becoming an ethical designer is to remove the need of adding the word “ethical”. And current day & age, this is nothing short of a revolution.
Remember, people forget designs that forget people. So go out there and build things that empower others, not imprison them.
Design ethics deals with anything & everything that establishes a moral & responsible relationship between a design/product & the end user. It's not just about deciding how “good” a design is, but also how much “goodness” the design entails. To the user, their ecosystem, & the society in whole. Being ethical on the papers is easy. It's easy to say that you are a staunch advocate of design ethics. Implementing the fundamental principles of ethical design in a practical sense is a totally different ballgame. Pressing deadlines, demands of the clients, & many such real time issues can make sticking to design ethics a major inconvenience. At this juncture it's important to do a reality check on these parameters
Ethical design structures - Instead of treating ethics as an isolated concept in design practice, make it an active & thriving element to your daily practice. Whatever you do, how you plan stuff, how you interact with your stakeholders, where you put your foot down, & the likes - ethics have to be an integral part of all of these & more.
Ethical organizational practice - If your organization’s mission & vision are not connected to design ethics, it's time to rethink a lot of things. Additionally, it's equally important to have organizational values match with your personal values as a designer.
Ethics & assumptions - A lot of unethical design practices & outcomes seep into the work when we are led by assumptions. Break this cycle by being extremely skeptical of ideas, beliefs, & notions that power your work every single day.
Own your mistakes - Moving one step ahead from identifying your assumptions, it's also important to actively seek what mistakes you made/can make, as its the only way to dive deep into the “unknown unknowns” (the lesser known, more elusive cousin of the “known unknowns”)
Ethical design KPIs
Exploring yet another important segment of ethical design, what critical parameters serve as ethical design evaluation criteria, we have listed down a few those here
- Ethical design yield products with easy & high usability
- Ethically designed products are accessible & inclusive of needs of every type of user
- Ethical designs take privacy issues seriously
- Ethical designs are persuasive, but not addictive
- Ethical designs don’t aim to disrupt users’ attention
- Ethical designs rank high on sustainability
- Ethical designs tend to improve societies & ecosystems
Ethical design & the social dilemma
The irony brewing between mega tech companies promoting their platforms as fundamental to the right to choose & then committing serious data breaches is one amongst many significant design ethics issues in the current day & age. The western political thought & philosophy considers individual freedom & freedom of speech/choice to be of utmost importance. Till recent times, the biggest threats to democracy were facist dictators & fundamentalist groups. But today, a different kind of ubiquitous threat looms around the world - the invasion of privacy, addiction to digital platforms, & trading of human attention.
And a lot of this has to do with design ethics - or rather, the paucity of the same in building design systems & product thinking methodologies. What’s the driving force behind design decisions? Is it empowering users with a seamless global connect or manipulating their decisions, hijacking their attention spans for a few more clicks?
From doom scrolling to Twitter hate to misinformation wildfire - being “online” or “plugged” to this newly unleashed digital macrocosm is ironically curtailing our individual & collective freedoms. To the massive extent that Nomophobia, the sudden feeling of anxiety & restlessness on being away from your phone/laptop, is now prevalent in more than 53% of the general population.
Proponents of this such product thinking methods might whitewash it by calling it engagement or product stickiness, at the end of the day all of these are fuelled by factors that lie in stark moral gray areas. This is where going back to the basics of ethical design & its KPIs can aim to trigger some change.
Role of a designer in all of this
Designers these days are not just designing interfaces.
They are designing how people will ultimately connect with other people & business to get things done. Much like their namesake, designers are actually designing (& directing) the way in which our civilization is moving.
And every bit of it counts. From something as simple as how a notification pops up on a device ( colors, emotional triggers, frequency, messaging, tone, emojis, icons & so on) to things with massive repercussions like privacy terms, behavioral changes, data breach & the likes are at the helm of the designers.
And hence, to quote Stan Lee “With great powers, come great responsibilities” .
To make a contextual addition to this, “With great powers, come great responsibilities, & a greater need to be ethical”.
The big battles have to be fought by you, the designers. So where does one start? Here are a few workable basic points to begin with
Design ethics evangelism - Very important to put your knowledge & insider’s information out there to communicate to both design & non-design communities the importance of design ethics & the dangers of unethical designs.
Practice what you preach - Lead the revolution by practice, not just with words. How you personally react to notifications, social media usage, addiction/heavy usage of digital platforms, & so on will take you one step closer to putting this in your work.
Own ethical design practices - In stakeholder meetings, in the research-strategy phase, in prototyping - every step of your design process the concept of design ethics must be addressed.
These are just some of the stepping stones towards establishing a culture where ethics & design are so closely intertwined that with time they become synonymous. The idea behind becoming an ethical designer is to remove the need of adding the word “ethical”. And current day & age, this is nothing short of a revolution.
Remember, people forget designs that forget people. So go out there and build things that empower others, not imprison them.
