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
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Not all harms caused by technology can be identified or solved through standard design research focused on pain points.
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Harms can be invisible to individual users and often emerge at societal levels over time, like Amazon’s impact on local businesses.
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Addressing technology harms often conflicts with corporate business models prioritizing profit and user engagement.
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Policy and design cycles share similar iterative structures but differ fundamentally in drivers: values versus profit.
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Designers have a unique vantage point to influence policy by bringing user-centric insights to lawmakers and regulators.
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Regulatory sandboxes in sectors like fintech offer a promising model for collaborative policy and design experimentation.
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Ethics tools in design can curb certain harms, such as bias and online abuse, but cannot address systemic or structural issues alone.
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Civil society plays a critical role in shaping public spaces and technology design, yet is often underrepresented in tech ethics discussions.
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International contexts, such as Sweden’s integration of UX in the public sector, differ greatly from the US, where UX is often tied to capitalism.
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Focusing on specific harms rather than attempting to address all ethical issues simultaneously enables more actionable and impactful work.
Notable Quotes
"Design ethics can impact some harms of new technology but not all and that’s why ethics can’t save tech."
"Standard design research looks for pain points, not harms, and harms often cannot be identified in user research."
"Harms often accrue to the level of society rather than individuals and only emerge over time."
"Policy is ideally driven by values; UX in the private sector is driven by delight and profit."
"Our influence and power as designers have limits; the future of technology cannot rest solely on individual ethics."
"You can connect with policymakers, like the FTC chair encouraging designers to combat dark patterns."
"Regulatory sandboxes allow for experimentation with policy in a sandbox environment and are worth exploring further."
"Civil society has pushed for public spaces to work for all, showing the power of collective voices in design."
"In Sweden, UX is more integrated into the public sector and not equated with capitalism as it is in the US."
"Focus on one specific harm rather than trying to address all at once; this creates communities of practice and shared progress."
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