Victoria, Sgarro, Slate; What Are “Ethics in Design”?
"Examples of product design that fail on the ethics front are all too easy to find—like news feeds promoting fake news, ride-hailing companies psychologically exploiting workers, and virtual home assistants perpetuating negative gender stereotypes.
It’s not that product designers don’t care about the ethical
ramifications of their work—far from it. It’s that, too often, they
assume that such considerations fall outside of their job description
Mike Monteiro, co-founder and design director of Mule Design and author of the influential essay “A Designer’s Code of Ethics,”
says that this ignorance has become an issue with the rapid change in
scope of design over the past decade. “Designers have been running fast
and free with no ethical guidelines,” he told me. “And that was fine
when we were designing posters and sites for movies. But now design is
interpersonal relationships on social media, health care, financial data
traveling everywhere, the difference between verified journalism and
fake news. And this is dangerous.”
Increasingly, though, the industry is taking ethics seriously. Every
year at SXSW, John Maeda, the global head of computational design and
inclusion at Automattic, presents the “Design in Tech Report,”
which serves as a kind of State of the Union on design in technology.
This year, Maeda focused on inclusion as the future of design. Maeda
defines inclusive design as designing products for a broader
audience—whether that’s people with disabilities, people living outside
of the U.S., people of color, or older people. On his list of “the top
10 most critical issues and challenges currently facing design,” “ethics
in design” came in third, behind “design not having a ‘seat at the
table’ ” (No. 1), and “diversity in design and tech” (No. 2)."
Issues and developments related to ethics, information, and technologies, examined in the ethics and intellectual property graduate courses I teach at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information. My Bloomsbury book "Ethics, Information, and Technology" will be published in Summer 2025. Kip Currier, PhD, JD
Showing posts with label interpersonal relationships. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interpersonal relationships. Show all posts
Saturday, August 18, 2018
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