Ethical Design
The design industry has come a long way over the past 10 -15 years. Human behavior and emotion have become more integrated into design. This has resulted in design having a bigger impact on people and cultures than ever before. Artificial intelligence and big data have increased the possibility to breach of security and privacy. These resources make it easier to target user behaviors to drive conversion. This can either be to convince users to get certain products or influence their decision. While this can be positive it can also be hugely negative and has become very common recently. This has caused a catch 22 and resulted in an ethical design conversation about where to draw the line. But the matter is not as white or black as it seems. Thus, to fully understand what ethical design is we need to first understand Ethics.
What is Ethics? Also known as moral philosophy, are the moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity. Ethics explores the nature of morality and examines how people should live their lives in relation to others. Unlike other aspects of philosophy, ethics is not based on facts. Therefore, it’s not measured by one guaranteed set of guidelines or standards. Each person’s individuals moral principles are specific to them so its impossible to have a standard. This makes it an interesting subject because it’s specific to individuals but also relative to others.
So now that we know what Ethics is, what is Ethical Design? The art of applying moral responsibility and good intent in design is ethical design or responsible design. Design ethics is mainly categorized into 3 classes:
- Misdirected Intent: In this case, designers prioritize business goals over that of users.
- Existential values: Designers reflect on their own values to determine what experiences they contribute to.
- Benevolent Intent: Designers place users at the front and center of design decisions while being rational about product development and business needs.
The power of maintaining an ethical design has been given to us designers. And our goal is to maintain balance by preventing business goals from overtaking users. Hence, every designer should aim to design with benevolent intent. Finally, while we design with benevolent intent in our design, we also want to be wary of unethical design.
In my next blog, I’ll talk more about how we can make sure our design decisions are made with benevolent intent.
