WINSight X Tech Ethics Panel: Our Role in Creating Ethical and Inclusive Technology
As a design industry, we are at a crossroads within the digital transformation age. Digital experiences are taking on a level of importance where the decisions of designers, engineers, product managers, and organizations can be additive or destructive to our societies. Today’s consumers are demanding the companies they partner with to be ethical, purpose-driven, and human-centric - all requirements that demand an approach that encompasses both the experience and the impacts of that experience.
Ethical Technology has shifted so much over the last decade - we now have curriculums dedicated to it, the conversation is happening in the Senate, there are documentaries about it. But yet actual ethical and inclusive practices are happening at a slower rate.
On Wednesday, May 19th, WIN invited the following special guests to share their stories and tips on how to infuse ethics and inclusivity across the entire design process.
Alba Villamil, an independent User Researcher and facilitator at Humanity Centered who specializes in designing for the social sector.
Alex Fiorillo, Founder and Principal of social impact design collective GRID Impact
Selina Petosa, founder of Rational Interaction and Design Director of Lending at SoFi
Tazin Khan, a Cyber Security Specialist and Founder of Cyber Collective
So, let’s talk about what it means to ‘design for good’, why ethics is so important, and what makes it extra important at this moment in time.
“Everything in the world is designed and it’s designed either intentionally or unintentionally.”
Ethics is important because everything in the world is designed. The digital age has brought to the surface the opportunity for design to play a role in everyday life. Designers try to contribute to the world in a positive manner but historically have not been held accountable for the unintended consequences of their work. Once one comes to terms with the idea that everything from physical infrastructure, to interactions, to communications, is designed, you start to identify where there may have been power, privilege, and unintentional exclusions in the process. It all comes down to who is doing the designing. Who has the power or money behind what is designed? Was it done intentionally or unintentionally? We must begin to anticipate issues that can come with the things we design and get the training we need to bring in resources so that we can create a more comprehensive design solution.
“Intention and impact are different things: just because we have a good intention does not mean that the impact is going to be what our desired intention was.”
It is imperative to set up ethical checkpoints along the design process and especially before the design work even starts. Before entering into a contract with a client, design teams must ask themselves this series of questions: What is the purpose of this work? Why are we doing this work now? Who defined this challenge? For whose benefit are we doing this work? To help the company or the actual audience and end users? What is the rationale behind it? Why are we the right team to be engaging in this work? Who is funding the work? All of these questions are important to help identify and define whether or not there is a positive intention to then co-create a project and scope of work that will be ethical and inclusive.
“If we don’t work to bring all people together, people might die.”
We hear a lot about technology having the power to bring people together but this doesn’t necessarily mean bringing ALL people together. There are a lot of gaps and racial elements in these technologies causing harm and downstream effects to specific communities, especially marginalized communities. Algorithms oppress and harm these marginalized communities. This is a problem that is starting to become unmanageable - Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are being developed off of problematic systems that are already in place. If we don't consider the larger systemic elements that are causing this, we’re not going to be able to properly develop positive technology.
“Designers have not been educated to think that it’s their responsibility and ultimately decide to remain neutral.”
With the problem getting bigger and bigger, and technology becoming more harmful and more difficult to disrupt, there is a huge risk to remaining neutral. Part of it is that we are not asking the right questions like what are the values that underpin our sense of ethics? Or, how can an organization make its products and services less racist? Too often, these questions are overlooked and we end up constantly having to push against colorblind ideology - the belief that to end racial inequality we need to treat others equally. For many designers and technologists, this ideology usually comes from a place of hope, that we should live in a world where race doesn't affect the way people can navigate our products and services. What ends up happening when we value this colorblind ideology, is that we end up designing products that exclude and harm users of color. For example, we create wearables that can’t screen for cancer on dark skin or we enable harassment and discrimination on social media because we don’t design for the behavior of prejudicial users on the platform. It’s not enough to be concerned about ethics and doing good. It’s about identifying the values that will motivate us to design towards a world that we want to exist in. Our ethical practices should be aimed at accomplishing this rather than rooting ourselves in a perceived set of common values that may not actually produce anything good.
“We need to get better at trying to answer the difficult questions we might not feel comfortable asking. We also need to be better at measuring impact.”
Oftentimes we are using metrics such as the number of signups or where people dropped out in the funnel. Even though these are easy to measure because they are quantitative, we need to begin pairing these findings with a qualitative understanding of what this actually means. Just because something has been through a design process or participatory process does not mean that it is better. So if we are not measuring impact, we do not know if we are doing good, no harm, or causing more harm and we must hold each other accountable for that. It’s on us designers to step it up - we need to understand what kinds of outcomes, metrics, KPIs, qualitative, qnatitave, whatever it might be but we have to look at the impact of our work.
“We need to orient our work towards being trauma-informed - this means that we need to respect people’s limits when doing research with them, and do emotional check-ins.”
In the design world, we also often talk about empathetic fitness - the ability to do really difficult work for years on end without burning out and losing empathy. Designers should be researching how to sustain this empathetic fitness for the people they are working with.
Another issue is that companies often treat ethics like a checklist. The context of our work as designers constantly evolves which means that the ethical challenges evolve as well. Our methods have to be responsive to the changing norms and political awareness that we grow into. We also need to stay aware: even when we make “positive” changes to our products, these can introduce new harms we hadn’t thought of. Take in-person content moderation on social media platforms, for example. These people are tasked with catching offensive material and disinformation but these are real people. Consuming all of this offensive material can be psychologically damaging. So designers have to think about not only how are we designing these platforms so that people don’t consume offensive material but also how are we designing the experience for content moderators because they are part of that system that that product exists in. So, one of the key elements of ethical products and processes is that a team has to be responsive to evolving social norms and always be on the lookout for new harms that can come up. The ethical work never stops.
Editorial: Chiara Rachmanis
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