How Might We…Design More Ethically?

The question of ethics in design has become of growing importance and urgency in the last few years — what does ethical design mean? How accountable are designers (or how accountable should they be)? How do we introduce ethical concerns into our practice? What tools and methods can we use to illuminate and assess potential issues?

As part of the Baltimore UX Meetup series, I recently helped put together a panel discussion on ethics and user experience design, along with co-organizers Yao Adantor and Jake Dibattista. We had a great panel of speakers who touched on a wide range of topics. To very briefly describe a few of the things each covered:

• Nur Karadeniz, Head of Experience & System Design at Brilliant Basics in the UK, talked about the importance of taking a systemic view so that you’re solving whole problems, with an emphasis on transparency and traceability as ways to enhance accountability. You can see a longer version of what she talked about here.
• Jeremy Wilken, Austin-based Engineer at Vmware, talked about privacy, and how the definition of this changes by context, person, and time in history. He gave a number of ways for designers to better incorporate privacy into products, especially for voice UIs like Alexa or Google.
• Cennydd Bowles is a UK designer and author of the book Future Ethics, and…