Ethical Virus

Ethics of Design

Something as fundamental to the human experience as ethics ought to be a fundamental part of human-centered design.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,The Gulag Archipelago
For a long while, I have been angry and frustrated with the design process and design community. It seems that our sole purpose is to make things that maximize profits as quickly as possible. User experience research and design is often used as a means to trick, manipulate, and separate people from their money and/or personal information.

Finally and thankfully, I came to realize the cause of my anger and frustration.

Ethics.

Ethics are almost entirely absent from UX. I have six HCI, UX, and design textbooks and one seminal Air Force report on user interface design within arm's reach at this very moment. That is a total of seven well-respected texts in our field. Only two of them even mention ethics. Of these two, one textbook has a paragraph on ethics regarding recruiting participants for research. The other has one-and-a-half pages on ethical interaction design, but it fails to even define ethics.

Define ethics

I have decided to do my part in rectifying this situation. I will begin by defining ethics. It is from the Greek work ethos, meaning customs. Ethics are right behaviors according to the customs of a particular group. I like to think of ethical things as thoughts, words, behaviors, designs, systems, and customs that are cumulatively more beneficial to life than they are harmful. Ethics are an essential part of civilization. Without ethics, people would not have ideas of right and wrong. They make society more stable and help people choose right actions over wrong ones. A society without ethics will fail sooner rather than later. It is important to state, however, that customs aren't necessarily ethical. Often unethical customs inspire social change, movements, and revolutions.

Ethics require constant practice and consideration—like good hygiene. We cannot wash our hands once and expect them to be clean for life. We must wash our hands multiple times a day, every day, in order for our hands to remain clean. With ethics, we cannot engage in one ethical act in our lives and assume that we are forever after an ethical person. We must practice and consider ethics at every turn. As Abraham Lincoln said, "There are few things wholly evil or wholly good. Almost everything...is an inseparable compound of the two, so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded."

Why ethics are important in our field

There are three reasons why it is imperative that as makers of interactive computing technology we must embed ethics into our culture, methods, and metrics:

First, what we create and put into the world has actual effects on actual people. Interactive designs do things. We need to make sure that our efforts are going into making things that do good things.
Second, computing technology has the ability to amplify human abilities and spread exponentially in record time.
Third, the ability to design and develop computing technology is to today's world what literacy was two thousand years ago. We are (tech)literate in a world of people who cannot read. We are the leaders and creators of the sociotechnical system in which we now live. We are powerful—more powerful than we even realize. With great power comes great responsibility.
Allies in the field

Very few professionals within our field are actively incorporating ethics into their work. I have managed to find a few, and I will highlight the main objectives of three researchers here. (Please feel free to share with me other professionals working on this topic. I would love to hear from you.)