Why Ethics Can't Save Tech
Summary
As fake news floods our feeds and small businesses suffer due to disruption from startups, many tech designers are hearing exhortations to focus on ethics. There are tool kits, checklists and even a sort of hippocratic oath for designers to take. These efforts are laudable and understandable, and they can help in some ways -- notably, in reducing harms of bias. But ethics also have limits because private sector capitalism is a force that is much bigger than anything that any one person can do. Instead, a countervailing force, such as the public sector, is needed to shape our technology. How might designers better understand, and even seek to work with and strengthen the public sector -- whose role it is to shape society? Alexandra is the author of the new Rosenfeld Media title, Deliberate Intervention: Using Policy and Design to Blunt the Harms of New Technology
Key Insights
-
•
Ethical design can address some tech pain points but often fails to prevent systemic harms that occur beyond individual user experiences.
-
•
Systemic harms often emerge after technology deployment and are difficult to detect through standard UX research focused on pain points.
-
•
Many harms in technology contradict core business models, making them controversial and hard to fix through design alone.
-
•
Policy, driven by collective values, complements UX design’s focus on profit and user delight and is essential to mitigate societal harms.
-
•
Designers who understand both user problems and policy landscapes can more effectively advocate for harm reduction through legislation and regulation.
-
•
Cross-sector collaboration between design and policy is still nascent but shows promising examples like regulatory sandboxes in fintech.
-
•
User-centered design methods can and should be incorporated into various stages of the policy cycle to improve policymaking.
-
•
International contexts reveal different relationships between UX, capitalism, and public sector involvement, highlighting the uniqueness of the US tech ecosystem.
-
•
Civil society and consumer voices play a critical role in influencing design and technology policy, often pushing for accessibility and ethical considerations.
-
•
Designers should abandon the savior complex and recognize their influence has limits, encouraging collaborative systemic approaches.
Notable Quotes
"Design ethics can impact some harms of new technology but not all."
"Standard design research looks for pain points, not harms, and harms often cannot be identified in typical user research."
"Many tech harms run counter to business goals and can be controversial to address."
"Policy is ideally driven by values, while UX in the private sector is driven by delight and profit."
"How do we as designers connect more deeply with the policy world? That’s still a developing thing."
"Technology moves faster than policymaking — that’s the pacing problem we need to address."
"User-centered design methods can be used at every stage of policy making, from intention setting to evaluation."
"We should reconsider the savior complex designers sometimes have — we’re not all powerful."
"The future of our technology cannot and should not rest solely on the ethics of individual designers."
"I’m totally freaked out by facial recognition and wonder why we don’t get together as consumers to push back on bad designs."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Seeing product managers and designers’ aha moments when they realize how impactful the tool is was great."
Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex KnollRepository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research
March 9, 2022
"Not everyone has the same capacity to aspire to a future; this is critical when working with marginalized communities."
Nicole AleongFuture Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology
March 26, 2024
"Disruptive innovation is about changing customer behavior, not shipping features."
Jeff GothelfInnovation Studios: the Engines of Enterprise Experimentation
May 14, 2015
"Meeting designers where they spend their time, like integrating accessibility plugins into Figma, is the most effective way to make progress."
Saara Kamppari-MillerDesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility
May 26, 2022
"It’s the individuals who choose whether and how they take advantage of the opportunities you create."
Tess DixonC'mon Get Happy
September 29, 2021
"Soft skills often are a multiplier on your hard skills—they’re just as valuable, if not more so."
Liam ThurstonWhy Your Design Team Is Quitting, And How To Fix It
June 10, 2022
"Careers as ladders are what HR wants, but careers aren’t linear; they should be a jungle gym."
Ian SwinsonDesigning and Driving UX Careers
June 8, 2016
"One researcher per team for at least three days a week was considered an outrageous luxury at GDS in 2013."
Leisa ReicheltOpening Keynote: Operating in Context
November 7, 2018
"Slowing down is hard in a capitalist economy that values speed, but patience and self-care are necessary."
Rachael Greene Alison DavisBuilding a Design Ops Practice that Really Works (Most of the Time)
October 2, 2025