Making sense of ethics in design: a discussion

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 -29th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU2908B) My name is Tim, I am here to keep these four on time, I invite you all to do the same. My research looks at how individuals in large organisations are redesigning their work, and reshaping the organisations to impact the world. In my research, I often refer to the people I meet as superheroes that are hidden in their organisations. And here are four people that I would consider as superheroes. I did only meet Mitch today, but I'm pretty sure he is alright (Laughs). They will be showing their visions. This session is intended to provoke and let us share our ideas in the design community. It will be interactive, and we are using an online platform called Mentimeter. We will ask you to share your experiences, ask questions, and we will have the opportunity to discuss this with the panel. I invite you to open your laptops and phones, look up Mentimeter, www.menti.com, 630 776. And the question is, would you like to fight a horse-sized duck or 100 ducks sized horses? That would terrify me, a horse size duck. One day get to the heart. I would love to see hundred ducks sized horses, for curiosity. Once we start with Sophie, I am sure that we can discuss this more. Let me introduce, she is a qualified anthropologist. Her masters thesis looked at social media identity and friendships, before she studied at Deloitte, now she looks at organisations and human beings, and love solving tricky problems and asking different quite kinds of questions. Are you are fixer or a provocative? SOPHIE GOODMAN: This is the problem with inviting you in, we don't know what you are going to do (Laughs). I like to provoke. TIM: if we transport ourselves into the future, how will we look back and see what was good for the consumer? SOPHIE GOODMAN: Looking at anthropological history, and being a good ancestor, there is a amazing quote, by the man who invented the polio vaccine,... I would like to share with you what I am thinking about it, I am thinking about time and time horizons, and the breadth of what we are considering, when we are doing our jobs here at UX community. To start off with what types of things have been released in the world, in the name of good customer experience. That one. There we go. Plastic bags, plastic shopping bags, amazingly convenient, but we all know, the oceans are getting polluted, by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean then there will be fished by weight. Is best loss was actually the magic mineral, this amazing building product, that was fire
2. UX Australia 2019 -29th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU2908B) Page 2 of 10 resistant, it is also incredibly strong, and flexible. But we also know, there are 107,000 deaths that are asbestos-related per year. DDT was used, to help reduce malaria, it got rid of mosquitoes. As you can see here, it was one after the trucks that were spraying the DDT. Good, but not so good, unexpected consequences. That is an interesting question for debate later. What about what we are designing today, what we are involved in. Notification. We are alerting our users to something that may require their attention, or could cause anxiety, destruction, addiction. Drawing users back into applications. GPS location technology, is amazing, to understanding when the next bus is coming, whether the driver is arriving, but it is also being used by some of these tracking apps, to keep our data. And we know that (inaudible) are coming into our devices and replicating. This is happening at scale, and automatically. So what is UX sense? In research recently, I have noticed that even customers are unsure of this. We are looking for delighting and making customers happy. I want to talk about a hierarchy of good, what is good for a customer, or user? It is not getting rid of all of this stuff, because it can be good, it is like a baseline, but we need to think of this hierarchy, getting towards this length of time, what we are considering where we are designing these sorts of products and services. What do we need to strive to - virtuous, sustainable... The outcomes are about customers being grateful, and their well-being, and social impact of that in a positive way. This is my UX stand-up joke. TIM: Thank you, Sophie. I'd like to introduce Mitch next, he specialises in leading design through delivery, he specialises in human sensitive products, and making sure that products respond to customers wants and needs. You are interested in physiological aspects of UX design? Where does this come from? MITCH CULLEN: Way back in uni, during my honours thesis, I was looking in depth at how we as designers can shape and craft experiences, then, as they go through it, there is a connection to the body, and how it affects the brain, the aetiology of your brain. Then it gets into ethics. Let's dive into it. So, you've got your brain, within your brain you have a big system, your hippocampus, the hippocampus is involved with the recreation, memory retention, and spatial navigation as well. People with Alzheimer's, or depression, have a smaller hippocampus, it retains less memory. A hippocampus that is bigger, is actually one that is helping problems, encountering challenges, wrestling with problems every day. But what does this mean for us as designers?
3. UX Australia 2019 -29th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU2908B) Page 3 of 10 Day in and day out, we create this expense. You have anything from the floor and the layout plans of buildings, to an intense navigational system, or a simple checkup Process. If we break this down and look fundamentally at it, we can bring right back to different types of pathways, linear, and non-linear. Very easy way to look at this is, a maze labyrinth, a linear labyrinth. You have one pathway to get to the end. Channelled in, simple, and direct, a checkout process. Non-linear, you have many different processes, different ways to get there. People that encounter these types of things, require more cognitive load to navigate. Face with more challenges to get through. Complex navigation structure, or another easy example, is going on the highway, from point A to point B, and then you are in the city, dealing with lots of different outputs. So, the complexity of the past that you move on, actually has a big influence on the attentiveness of the people that are moving through. Studies from Oxford have actually shown that bus drivers have a smaller hippocampus, because they use linear processes day out and day and, from point a to point B. Taxi drivers, actually have a larger hippocampus, they are more engaged, solving problems day in and day out, between each and every trip, of efficient paths. They are dealing with more. Of late, we have had an influx of linear experiences. We have got U-tube, Netflix, everything that is staring us along the linear path of consumption. More grabbing of our attention, machine learning algorithms that serve up the sleep depriving link or image. From here, a really helpful way to paint the picture further, is a concept from literature. 'House of Leaves' appropriated the term 'ergodik', nontrivial effort, or extra effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text, this is a pretty hard book to read, it is called (inaudible), from a design context, we bring this in, using it as a lens to explain and face challenges, as people go through challenges that we create. What would this type of design look like? It can be deliberately applying a cognitive load, step, pause, to really help someone to understand, to take a break, help them face a weighted tension, understand the message that they need to receive . I'm not saying that linear or nonlinear are good or bad, there is a case for both, but as we move through, as designers, I really want to ask you all," are we putting enough deliberate breakpoints, or friction, to help users understand what they are giving away by signing up to this? By giving away permission? Data?". Next time, ask yourself, "Is it too simple?". TIM: Go back to the Mentimeter site, we have some questions up there. We have heard from two very passionate individuals already, and we still have two more. Think
4. UX Australia 2019 -29th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU2908B) Page 4 of 10 of your questions. The next speaker, Harry, says a product should serve the needs of consumers. Harry, what role has ethics played in your design? HARRY MANN: I can only approach from the perspective of myself and those around me because I am not a professor of ethics. It is probably at the front of our minds at the moment in these troubled times. I thought it really came through earlier this year, I wanted to illustrate this when I sent out a survey to the UX team at Deloitte. I asked them what work they want to do because I am hoping we can do work that can excite people. I was not expecting the term 'meaningful' to jump out. Sure, we'll want to do meaningful work. When I look at what people mean by that, there is social impact, not-for-profit, social impact, when I added them together there was collectively a high rate of responses from the team. What my team means by meaningful is work that is good for society. I am not up here saying, "Let's all go work at a not-for-profit." I think we should do that, but the point to me is where do we direct all of this optimism and positive energy that is apparent in the team? A really lovely suggestion on that one was an idea proposed by Peter, philosopher of technology, he deals with the ethics of things. He believes we should apply an ethical layer of thinking two things. I thought this was quite relevant because I make things everyday. It is a weird idea, also. Ethics is normally applied to how we govern people's behaviour. We ask our things have ethics. His argument is that as people we are fundamentally mediators via technology. Technology is influencing us all of the time and even if we want to do we could not escape that influence. The goal becomes not to protect people from the influence of technology but to make that influence a productive one. I realised I am quite influenced by a whole lot of things. That is me on Instagram, sitting on a precarious rock ledge. I have a caption talking about the wonderful view. I wasn't actually thinking about the wonderful view at the moment, I was thinking, "I hope I don't die, hurry up and take the photo." I worried I was tense in the photo because I was holding on tightly, but not relaxed, because I might fall. That was what was going to my head in that wonderful moment in Instagram. People die, actually. They have lost their lives in pursuit of perceived happiness on Instagram, it is a serious business. You know, I am quite influenced by that. Another thing I am influenced by is Netflix. Mitch brought it up, a quote from Netflix CEO. Netflix is winning the battle against sleep. They are winning it quite often, actually. They won it last night and now I am really sleepy. It occurs to me every week that I lose that battle. This is not to poke holes, obviously although with big tech companies I do have fun doing that. If
5. UX Australia 2019 -29th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU2908B) Page 5 of 10 I was a designer at a Netflix or Instagram, I would have possibly created the same features, let's be honest. People want them, so they say. We can clearly see the things we design have influenced, so that puts us, as designers, as very influential. What are we doing with that power, that platform? That is what we wanted to think about. I have a deceptively simple suggestion that we make actually good things and by doing that collectively we make things good. Essentially we apply ethical frameworks to the things that we make so that with all of the small design decisions we can make things better in a broader sense. It is about the little things, not the huge things that you generally focus on when thinking about ethics. I am a practical guy who leads a team of designers and I wanted to think about how to do that. I looked at a design framework that we use and the (unknown term) framework is something we used all the time. If you apply an ethics lens to it you get higher order questions you need to enter. Maybe what people want is to think about people need. Instead of what is a sustainable business model, we should be thinking about what a responsible business model is. In terms of what is technically possible, we should be thinking about what is technically moral. I think a lot of tech organisations have fallen victim to immoral developments. A shift in how we apply our frameworks is what we need is a starting point. I wanted to dig deeper again. How do we do that? How do we make people things that they genuinely need? I have a good grasp on this. Everyone is familiar with hierarchy. We have epic speeches and stories, that decides on the value. My team applied a needs architecture on that, Mitch is nodding. Needs, goals and tasks. We use lab, so that every epic story is tied to and consciously solving a pre-existing human need. Not the business outcome or something functional. That has been quite a settle over the last few years. How do we be my responsible? One thing I've noticed it we are getting better and better at optimising and tracking business outcomes but we need to track social outcomes. If we thought about that, we have customer engagement at the level of success but what if we had customer well-being? What we're trying to track is not engage customers but less stressed people. Not the percentage of people logging in but the percentage of people with spare cash at the end of the month. That shift in mindset could make people happier and we might have more loyal customers. One more. How do we know what is moral with our tech? This is the hardest one that I have the least practical experience doing. What comes down to, I think, is being conscious and aware and examining the influence that tech is having on people. We have to moralise the technology and ask if the influence is appropriate for the context. If we are aware of the influence, how transparent is it? When we're not being transparent
6. UX Australia 2019 -29th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU2908B) Page 6 of 10 enough, or the user, it is not really benefiting them quite enough, that is when we're, riding on our morals and we lose people's trust in those instances. Final thought. All of the little things that we are designing are collectively having increasingly large impacts on the world. They are changing a lot. I think, you know, if we apply ethics to the things, collectively we can have a big impact. I want us to all think about as designers in the UX community is how we can optimise things that we are designing to do good. I would love to hear more suggestions from everyone else, thank you so much. TIM: It only took 25 minutes for 'Black Mirror' to creep into the discussion. It is interesting the notion that we make the things and then things make us. If we go back to making good things, the question then is, and we making better human beings? One to ponder on. I'm glad you answered it. A quick shout out to Mentimeter. We'll love to get some questions. I will introduce a last panelist, Grace. She leads research practices that concretely play out in technology. Grace, I get a sense that one question will not cut it with you. Every conversation we have had goes on a tangent. If we move beyond our own questions, how can we meet unmet needs and move towards radical futures all? GRACE TURTLE POLIFRONI: I would say to listen to who and what. So, in terms of who we listen to, the fact we were talking about come to this way of thinking that is ontological. This suggests we design things, we design technologies and those technologies shape the world. And they shape us, right? We shape technology and technology shaped us. We make cars and we moved to the suburbs. Then we are stuck in traffic. We are in this point in time where we are reflecting on technology in a way that is very much needed because, somehow, we have lost our way. This is probably due to the attention economy and the fact that we're so upset with screens. This has meant we have lost our own critical perspective and our ability to act critically on the world, in terms of how make decisions. How technology will, for better or worse, was able to put this man on the screen as well as this incredible young woman. So, we are fighting this tension, right? For the good or bad of what our technology is can do. We are also, like this guy, experiencing future-shock. This is an issue because we are really, really not addressing what we should be addressing as human beings or as designers. This is resulting in us being faced with a crisis of imagination. I don't know if you have seen Adam Curtis's hype in my session, but he opens his film with that he cannot imagine a different or better future. This is true. If we continue to see people addressing this point we have this lack of imagination. We are living in such times, yet there is hope, right? What narrative do we bring to the table? I am a child of the 90s, I am very glad I am, I've expressed some things that young
7. UX Australia 2019 -29th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU2908B) Page 7 of 10 people have not. We can act critically, imaginatively, we have lost that place. I feel for the imagination of our youth, and how they will address the climate catastrophe that is in front of us. We also grow up with science fiction that was based on cyber punk. Who grew up with science fiction? You know cyberpunk? I have nothing against cyberpunk. I am into science fiction, but I loathe the fact that most cyberpunk is a white guy with a narrow view of the world. I much prefer Ursula Le Guin, who is a good woman. (Laughs) Basically, a part of addressing our crisis of imagination comes back down to colonisation. Most Western societies, and communities, tried to master language, the other, put the Other, down, because we can't make sense of it. We create this other world, that does not embrace (inaudible). What has happened, we have seen the emergence of exhilaration in thinking about societal transition, the shape, how we navigate the world, and narratives around those. We are also seeing this new kind of feminism, and embracement of the other, this is a beautiful thing that opens up possibilities for everyone to imagine a world otherwise. We are accessing futurism, seeing things differently by using history. We are embracing our Indigenous cultures, and going back to that knowledge, to again imagine the world otherwise. In ethics, asking any question around ethics (inaudible), you have to take into account the social, political, systems, in which those ethics exist. How do we do that? How do we break out of this matrix that we have trapped ourselves in? We think about the future, and unknown possibilities. We can continue to follow the path that the market has laid out, so nicely, or we can challenge that, look at different time scales, reactions to external forces that shape our experiences, technologies, and ways of design. We can think about societal transition, reactions to longer-term vision. We can actually start questioning power structures, which we don't do enough. Who has a power? What do we have power over? Who has power over us? Where is the power to change? And who needs to change? What needs to change? Then, we need to reimagine futures, we need to reach (inaudible) worlds. (inaudible) says we can better respond to reframing ethics in design mac This really comes back to science fiction, creating worlds, experiencing them. if you want to do an experiment, unlock your phone. Once you have unlocked your phone, I want you to hand it to the person next to you. Let them
8. UX Australia 2019 -29th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU2908B) Page 8 of 10 have a look at your DMs. How does that make you feel? Is it uncomfortable? Basically, we need to engage in the gut feeling, to fill distant futures, and we need to think about alternative timescales, let's think longer cow than just two years, let's challenge the status quo, there is another way. TIM: I knew that you go for a longer five minutes... I don't want us to live on a note of doom and gloom. One last question, what do you see in UX design, that gives you hope? SPEAKER: A general awakening that has spread, anthropology, and anthropologist have been working in AI for about five years now, establishing research. That is spreading. It is like an awakening that is happening. SPEAKER: For me, as a designer, what gives me hope, is the renewed opportunity, making a difference to the ethics, the perception of people that are actually using what we create. SPEAKER: The optimism of my team gives me hope, and gives me confidence, and has enabled me to challenge them in leadership meetings, when I can say that my team does not want a particular thing. SPEAKER: What makes me optimistic is that there is this awareness and collective mood that things have to change, but how do we respond to that change gives me optimism, how do we enact, how do we act? SPEAKER: There was a nice note about whether we were rambling, but they are rambling in the room next door also. Quick question, is it a design or ethics problem? SPEAKER: I think it is a design problem, there is no greater position of influence, we are not always the decision-makers, but we can influence them. TIM: Anyone want to disagree on the panel? SPEAKER: What is a positive ethics clash with relation to business? Is Deloitte an ethical company?
9. UX Australia 2019 -29th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU2908B) Page 9 of 10 SPEAKER: I don't think a company that... If you see a company is a fiction, that is as large as Deloitte, it has many, many faces, many stories. There is definitely parts of Deloitte that are 100% ethical, or aims to be. All there are definitely parts that are a bit further away ethically. That is a reality, a notion that we have to grapple with, the fiction that creates our organisation, that is quite structural like Deloitte, has to be reframed, and in order to do this, we have to go through a long, long list of actions, and initiatives to transition the organisation. You can't just been a state of right or wrong, you have to transition. Deloitte is on that journey. TIM: One more question, what kind of ethical problems have you been confronted with? SPEAKER: A lot of things that I am working on, the scale that they are at, are contributing to the automation of the workforce. Essentially, they are putting people out of jobs, and I worry about that. SPEAKER: The previous question as well, it is around different teams having ethics, being able to champion that within the organisation. I invite the panelists one last thing that they would like to offer to the audience to consider. SPEAKER: Hiring more social scientists. SPEAKER: Just trying to think about the downstream impacts, the (inaudible), it is hard to solve problems that you do not know yet. SPEAKER: The ethics of any of the organisations... If we lead into these companies, challenge these ethics from the inside, then things will change. SPEAKER: I would interrogate everything, including the organisations you work for, interrogate the future that they offer you, whatever the way you find possible, trying to reframe the way you look at the world, how you can make things different and better, more sustainable. SPEAKER: Challenge your mindset. A great way to finish. Thank you Sophie, Mitch, Harry, and Grace. [APPLAUSE] SPEAKER: And thank you for being such an awesome audience. Many questions we couldn't get to. I do
10. UX Australia 2019 -29th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU2908B) Page 10 of 10 invite you to bring the questions to the panel during lunchtime, or from home. SPEAKER: And there was a question about (inaudible), it is essentially a patriarchal system.