Designing ethical futures: Speculating about tomorrow to help us get through today
Most of the designers I know face ethical challenges at work, and I find myself wondering if they ever act on them.
Times have changed, and designers are thinking differently. We’re working amidst a pandemic and it’s weird and uncharted territory. It can feel hard to ‘do the right thing’ when nothing feels normal.
But it’s also a good opportunity to give things a rethink. And that’s the part of you I’d like to talk to today. I’d like to introduce a bit of lightness to what is usually a bit of a heavy topic. Thinking about what’s next can be daunting, but it can also be exciting and hopeful.
I see ethics as helping bring about positive changes from this new spot we find ourselves in; leveraging where we’re at and pushing ourselves towards meaningful changes in our work.
And because of this, it might just actually be the best year yet.
We can use Speculative design to help locate our ethics and bring about the new futures we want to create for ourselves. I’ll come back to talk more about what Speculative Design is a bit later on.
I believe that as designers, we shape the world around us so we have a moral imperative to take a good look at design ethics however hard or impenetrable it might seem. Particularly now, as the ideas of what matters has come sharply into view.
In 2018, before all this, I studied a Masters in Design Futures at RMIT and began exploring design ethics and I chatted with over 30 designers who all had completely different ideas about what ethics means for design practice.
Almost everyone I interviewed told me to create an ethical toolkit or create a set of ethical heuristics, but the research showed me that it is not possible to advance our thinking on design ethics through a unified approach; that we needed something different. Every designer I spoke to saw ethics in practice completely differently.
So, I went in search of new ways to explore ethics.
I had a hunch that the first step sat with the designer. That we needed to start here.
The media buzz
Design ethics are getting a bit of hype at the moment — in Australia anyway!
‘The social dilemma’ documentary on Netflix reached 190 countries in 30 languages and was at #1 for a week in September this year.
For those who haven’t watched it, The Social Dilemma is an expose on the dangers of social media. It’s eye-opening and a documentary everyone should watch. It goes into detail about the lack of ethics in companies behind social platforms and the pretty creepy and dangerous practices they employ.
I sat in stunned silence as I watched the documentary. It made me sad, mad, angry, and reflective.
The documentary features a guy named Tristan Harris who was a Former Design Ethicist for Google. He has since co-founded the ‘Centre for Humane Technology’, who believe that as long as social media companies profit from outrage, confusion, addiction, and depression, our well-being and democracy will continue to be at risk.
‘If you’re not paying for the product then you are the product.’ Let that sink in.
I’m excited that awareness is growing. We’re in new territory now, and have an opportunity to make incredibly positive changes.
The question is how?
So, what are ethics?
Being human involves making choices. And whenever we make a choice, it means that we could have made a different one. Out of all the choices we can make at any given time, which choice should we make?
This is what ethics are. Ethics help us work out how to act.
What do we mean by design ethics, then?
Design ethics is an extension of our personal ethics. Like ethics, design ethics are the choices we make daily, just at work. Design ethics impact our teams, clients, customers and society, as well as ourselves, and we feed our ethics into what we create and send out into the world.
But the way to design ethically doesn’t start with other people or what they believe is ethical. It starts with us as designers.
Before designers can identify, share and scale ethics at work, they need to firstly seek out where they stand ethically speaking.
Understanding where our moral compass lies is the first step toward identifying where we might be going wrong at work.
A Design theorist named Richard Buchanan defines design ethics as concerning the moral behaviour and responsible choices in the practice of design (Buchanan 2005).
Another design theorist who taught me during my undergrad degree sees design ethics as bridging the gap between ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’ what is ethical. He asks what it will take to form individuals who feel compelled to act reasonably, before they can ever design the future (Tonkinwise 2004).
In laymen’s terms it’s about making responsible choices in our design practice by firstly acknowledging something is unethical and taking action.
But this can be incredibly hard to do, particularly when certain things might be out of our control, or involve standing up to a boss.
How my design ethics journey began
But my interest in ethics started 8 years ago as I began to notice questionable practices happening at work circa 2012, so I started to compile a list of the ethical dilemmas I had faced around that time:
Of the twenty-nine I recorded some major dilemmas were:
- Work being rehashed across different client projects;
- Jargon being pushed to cause confusion for clients and stakeholders;
- Dark design patterns;
- Tech consultancies selling themselves into organisations as Service Design or Digital Transformation experts, with no knowledge of design process or practice;
- Human-centred design firms who did not practice human-centricity in their internal processes or practices;
- Not getting paid for three months for three months of freelance work;
- Job titles including the word ‘design’ or ‘designer’ when the individual has no design experience.
They all seemed unethical to me because they challenged the foundations of what I believe is right; where my ethical compass lies. This process helped form the basis of my own ethical design practice and process which I’ll talk more about later on.
You might empathise with some of them or maybe none of them and I’m sure you’ll have your own set of ethical dilemmas which I can help you uncover.
Why a focus on the designer, first?
Reflecting on this list of ethical dilemmas, I began to wonder how other designers felt. There must be more designers who had faced ethical challenges in their design careers too.
I also started to think about how my responses to those situations could impact the design work I was doing. That somehow if I felt disgruntled, my work might be impacted.
I realised it becomes difficult to engage a discussion on design ethics without gaining insight into the designer as the key medium through which ethics are fed into designed things.
I hypothesised that in order to gain an understanding of the role of ethics in design, a focus on the designer is required as the reference point. I cared a lot about the impact of products and services on society but realised that before I can assess and rethink impact practices, I need to understand the role of ethics for the designer as an initiator of this string of events.
Mike Monteiro says it well. In his ‘A Designer’s Code of Ethics’:
‘Before you are a designer, you are a human being. Like every other human being on the planet, you are part of the social contract. We share a planet. By choosing to be a designer you are choosing to impact the people who come in contact with your work, you can either help or hurt them with your actions. The effect of what you put into the fabric of society should always be a key consideration in your work. Every human being on this planet is obligated to do our best to leave this planet in better shape than we found it. Designers don’t get to opt out.
When you do work that depends on a need for income disparity or class distinctions to succeed you are failing your job as a citizen, and therefore as a designer.’
By starting with ourselves, the only thing we can really control, we can extend our ethics into our work and positively change society. We have to tune in. Our work has serious repercussions on people and the planet and the futures we’re designing.
Research insights
Reflecting on these dilemmas and the work of great design thinkers, I wondered if there was a framework or process for ethics that would help me (and others) land on the ‘right’ decisions.
To that end, I talked to 30+ designers at different stages of their careers across corporate, government, not-for-profit, those who had studied academically and those who hadn’t. I was fortunate enough to speak to luminaries in the field, as well as newbies. I held meetup’s, had one-on-one chats, and created prototypes to test my growing hypotheses, which I’ll talk to you about in a tic.
I came up with a few insights which I’d like to share with you.
- Ethics are different for every designer
Sounds obvious, right? Participants defined the ethics in their practices very differently. I discovered that A designer’s cultural background, experience and values are the foundations for the role ethics plays in their professional practices.
When ethical challenges popped up and teams hadn’t had to deal with similar things before, it was often easier for them to do nothing rather than something, which festers over time and results in tension building.
Every research participant had a different view of what facing an ethical dilemma at work might mean, such as:
- Driving design outcomes in a direction relevant to the problem and the organisation, even if it is not the job they were hired to do;
- Spending less time on how we use technology for the solution and more time giving the appropriate context for the technology;
- Following procedural process when it opposes your values;
- Being biased toward your own ideas;
- Researching with vulnerable people on sensitive topics; and
- Navigating the design process with integrity when the organisation is new to the methodology, and only want results.
This is why we avoid ethics; it is so hard to pin down. It’s messy, challenging and truly subjective. We all have completely different motivations and incentives and we think about process, impact and responsibility in different ways because we all come from different places with unique perspectives.
So, how do we work out where ethics make sense for us?
If we’re not tuned in with what we disagree with or what doesn’t align with our values ethically speaking, then how can we know when and how to take action?
By reflecting.
2. Reflecting helps designers ethically ‘tune in’
The designers I spoke to who engaged in Reflective practice were the designers who felt more ethically ‘tuned in’.
Reflective practice is the ability to reflect on one’s actions in order to engage in a process of continuous learning. Taking the time to think or reflect on the moments that annoy us ethically speaking help us figure out what to do to kick-start ourselves into ethical gear.
A good chunk of the 30+ designers I talked to engaged in some kind of reflection about their jobs and how they saw their role in design practice, and they did things like:
- Meditation;
- Practiced mindfulness;
- Set boundaries for themselves at work;
- Shared feelings openly with colleagues; and
- Kept a log of their project process.
These vehicles for self-reflection are the foundation for discovering design ethics. Engaging in these practices can help designers identify where they might be going wrong at work and help to begin the journey of positive and meaningful change that makes sense in the unique context we’re all in.
Reflecting on the insights above, I discovered that design ethics should be opened up for exploration and experimentation, to help other designers reflect to find their own definitions of design ethics; that a one size fits all solution just won’t work for design practitioners.
So I began to explore speculative design.
What is Speculative design?
Speculative design is a theory which uses scenarios to travel ahead in time and paint a picture of what could happen if we don’t take new directions in the present. Speculative design began its life in the art world about a decade ago, created to theorise the practices artists were exploring to tell their story of alternate realities. Through physical, sculptural pieces, the artworks took viewers to another dimension by exploring ideas which challenge the questionable aspects of our existence.
Pivoting this into design practice, Speculative design uses scenarios to project into the future in order to rethink the present.
Dunne and Raby in their seminal text ‘Speculative Everything’ define a scenario as the proposition of an alternative that through its lack of fit with this world offers a critique by asking, “why not?” (Dunne and Raby, 2013).
As part of my continuing research into design ethics, I took influence from ‘Speculative Everything’ and created several scenarios to offer designers the opportunity to rethink their ethical position in an open-ended and speculative way in order to reflect. The scenarios are designed to discover whether a speculative design can incite ethical tensions for design practitioners and help locate their ethics.
My aim for these scenarios is to achieve this ‘foot in both worlds’ as a tool for a designer to think through their own beliefs, and their experiences of their own ethical tensions.
I’m also experimenting with the creation of a speculative design ethics canvas to explore alternate ways to instigate self-reflection to help designers locate their ethics.
The canvas sets out a series of questions to enable designers to follow through on the ethical irks they may be experiencing in order to locate the root cause and work out how to act upon it.
These are all experiments to explore the research insights I found in 2018. It’d be great to get any feedback you might have on the experiments, and help design ethics grow and be explored, experimented with and ultimately engaged in whatever way makes sense for you as the designer in search of your own ethics. Explore it, but, at minimum ACT on it.
Experiments and Canvas available at www.designethics.com.au
Lucy West is a Melbourne-based design practitioner with over 12 years’ experience working across the design spectrum. She gets her kicks exploring new forms of design practice with a focus on design ethics and speculative design.
References
Buchanan, Richard 2005, ‘Design ethics’, Encyclopaedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics. Detroit, pp 504–510.
Schön, Donald 1983, ‘The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action’, New York: Basic Books.
Tonkinwise, Cameron 2004, ‘Ethics by design, or the ethos of things’, Design Philosophy. Papers vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 129–144.
(Websites accessed December 2020)
https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Reflective_Practitioner.html?id=ceJIWay4-jgC&redir_esc=y
