Session Title
Design Ethics
Presenter
Kaleem Khan
Session Type: Discussion
User experience design has no ethics guidelines. Practitioners taking shortcuts due to time and budget pressures, participation in questionable business practices and projects, and a lack of considered thought all have a direct impact on ethical lapses. This opens the door to unintentional mistreatment of participants in research studies, clients, and the people who use our designs.
In contrast, other design disciplines (architecture, graphics design, industrial design, etc) and social sciences (anthropology, psychology, sociology, and others) have long-established ethics guidelines. Behaviour of professionals and how work product is handled and used are shaped by ethical principles and practices. Ethics boards oversee these disciplines to protect the welfare and govern the treatment of participants.
We don’t need to start from scratch. We can look to our peers in other fields for direction in developing our own design ethics.
This session is recommended for anyone with an interest in discussing the ethical challenges we face in day-to-day practice, strategies to deal with the quandaries we are confronted with and starting the conversation about how to best bring design ethics to our work.
Biography
Kaleem makes things simple.
As a strategist, consultant and designer, Kaleem helps global companies, agencies, startups and governments create great experiences and solve complex problems.
Over two decades, he has worked with clients that include leaders in consumer electronics, mobile technology, Internet services, software, health care, financial services, telecom and security.
Kaleem is a member of an alphabet soup of professional user experience groups including ACM SIGCHI, IAI and IxDA. He is a UXnet ambassador, local leader of the UX Book Club, and steward of the UX Irregulars, a Toronto-based UX group with members around the world.
He is a founding partner of strategy and research consultancy True Insight.
7 Comments
The impact of our design decisions increases everyday. We’re now affecting people in all of the interconnected digital, physical, social, and emotional realms, simultaneously. These changes mean ethics is a critical issue for designers to understand and respond to. It’s time to think about more than just our practice and process, and ethics is one of these bigger picture issues that designers encounter on a daily basis – I’m rooting for this session b/c I hope it will advance the community’s level of awareness and discussion around ethics.
I would love to continue this conversation in a more concrete way than we have to date.
The introductory discussions we’ve had so far (if I remember correctly someone talked about it at last year’s IxD) were necessary, but I think we’re ready to move forward, and I think this talk could be a perfect way of doing that.
Kaleem, how are you planning to structure the conversation? I can see using other professionals’ guidelines as a starting point, and then we could discuss their applicability to us.
Thanks Joe & Meredith for supporting my proposal.
This is something that I have been thinking about for some time. I’ve submitted similar proposals about design ethics to previous conferences and they were rejected. I found it especially surprising due to the glaring lack of discussion on this topic.
I have to acknowledge Lou Rosenfeld for encouraging me to keep trying to get this topic into a conference session. When faced with repeated rejections from many sources, the message is that professional peers don’t want to address what I consider to be a critical subject. Thanks, Lou.
Meredith, I have several ideas on how to structure the conversation, including the one you offered, as part of multiple methods that we use in the Transformation Design working group at the Strategic Innovation Lab.
My goal is to make this a session where we have full participation and tangible results at its conclusion, instead of just another academic conversation.
As you know, I think this is timely and an important topic.
I’m not sure that professional peers are necessarily avoiding this on purpose, but maybe feel uneasy with what can come across as premature orthodoxy or top-down moralizing. It’s not an easy topic, and we have a relatively libertarian crowd in the UX universe.
I’ve lately been wondering if, rather than creating static ethical guidelines, we figured out what sort of framework might help the community emerge consensus on “not being evil” that can evolve over time? Just a thought …
Anyway, just suggesting you may want to head that fear off at the pass in your description, as well as mention an example or two of what you would see as “tangible results.”
Good luck with this!
Andrew, thanks for your thoughtful feedback and suggestions. I share your belief that this is a difficult topic and that people feel uncomfortable when it is raised. I did not mean to cast any aspersions upon or ascribe motives to our professional peers where none exist. When given the opportunity, most of us want to do the right thing. The problem is that it’s not always clear how to do so.
While I mentioned existing guidelines in other fields and producing tangible results, I should make it clear that I am NOT aiming for prescriptive, static guidelines or the creation of an oversight committee as an outcome of this session. Those solutions are the result of decades of work within specific disciplines and institutions. They are mentioned as examples and starting points to spur the conversation.
Your thoughts on this topic resonate with mine.
My primary goals for this session are to:
1. Engage our community in a manner that will get us thinking about the ethical dimensions of our work beyond the confines of a single conference session. One measure of success would be to have participants return to their communities, engage and encourage peers to consider ethics in their work and decision-making.
2. Begin sketching a framework for ethical principles that is flexible enough to accommodate and adapt to the range of settings we work in and the activities that we undertake. I am not under the illusion that we will invent a system in a 45 minute-long session. I do think that we can get a sense of the common types of ethical challenges we face and form a consensus around what we need to build a useful ethical framework.
I’m not saying I agree with it, but it’s worth addressing this idea: Do ethics belong in a designer’s toolbox at all? I mean, in any different way than the ethics one should have in the rest of one’s life? Maybe the model is not defining or identifying set of “design ethics” but rather figuring out “how your own ethics can be brought to design”. A libertarian’s ethics when it comes to design might be a lot different than those of a activist philanthropist.
Chris, thanks for your thoughtful feedback, including questioning the premise of this session. Given the conversations I’ve had over the last few years, I believe that there is a need for an ethical framework.
Your suggestion of bringing one’s own ethics to design is an excellent idea, which fits the framework model. No two circumstances are identical so a cookie-cutter approach won’t do.
Thanks again for your comments. I hope we can discuss this further at Interaction’10 or elsewhere.