Design Ethics
You’re sitting on your couch.
There is nothing interesting on TV, and you can’t find a good show to watch on Netflix.
You grab your phone and start going through your applications.
Facebook. Snapchat. TikTok. Instagram. Youtube.
By the time you scroll through all your feeds, hours have passed without you even realizing it. Even though your selection of social media applications might differ from the one above, there is a common theme — the influence and addiction of social media.
“It would send me an email, and then a text message, and then a link to a photo of someone,” he says. “I could see how the program was trying to get me back on the platform and it made me feel really disgusted.” — Director of Social Dilema.
India is in the process of building the world’s largest digital biometrics identification system: Aadhaar. Scanning fingerprints, recording iris’, and linking demographic information, Aadhaar connects 1.4 billion residents to all public and many private services — wifi, healthcare, train tickets, schools, and so on. However, 30 cases have been brought against the program in the national Supreme Court and 210 government websites have had personal data leaks.
The program intended to highlight India’s technological progress and innovation has instead highlighted individual vulnerability and concerns of data security and privacy. It is therefore essential that when designing and building new products we include those who may not have access or have been forgotten in the ever-advancing and digitized technological world.
One of the most important factors to remember is that humans are inherently social beings.
We evolved as social creatures and have built a desire to interact or know about our peers or, in some cases, people we don’t know as well.
As we dive into how these applications operate, we start to see why it becomes addictive.
As a designer, I actively engage on social media to immerse myself in the design community. I feel that I need to engage to increase my chances of being hired.
My question is, how do I proceed with my life? As a human who uses and as a designer?
As a user, I can
- Engage less. Remove notifications. Sign out my accounts after usage. Time my usage. Actively create barriers. Dropping old habits is not effective without a new habit to replace them. So how about I…
- Engage more in face-to-face and voice calls. Tell my loved ones that I prefer calls and text messages instead of social media communication. Remind me that virtual interactions do not replace the real deal.
- Directly reach out to friends when I feel lonely and excited to share. Although being alone isn’t always lonely, it doesn’t mean we don’t feel it. But what’s wrong with that? Loneliness and the need to share is human. Why don’t we do it in a way that fills our soulful voids instead of making them bigger?
As a designer and working professional, I can
- Educate myself in design ethics.
- Critically think about blind spots and plausible consequences. What am I really designing for? What are some unintended consequences? Let’s get more diverse voices into the design critique. Be brave and remain open to, and even invite, disagreement. Dissenters may see what my biases hide from me.
