March 30, 2023
The need for designers to fear the consequences of their work
No design exists in a vacuum, it impacts a well-run system called society at large. We need to fear the consequences of our work more than the cleverness of our ideas.
Design is an action-oriented discipline. We make things! They go out into the world and have an impact on others. People don’t appreciate our interfaces, they use them to get things done in their life. The decisions we make have ramifications. What you bring into the world is your responsibility. We cannot be surprised when a database we designed to catalogue immigrants gets those immigrants deported or developed an algorithm to target a specific section of people for advertisement.
A white supremacist opened fire on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, during an evening prayer service on March 15, 2019. He assassinated fifty people. He had a camera on him and was live-streaming his act of terror. The video went viral across multiple platforms, despite a public outcry to take it down. The platforms were doing precisely what they were designed to do: spread, sensationalize, and drive engagement. As teams across the major platforms attempted to eradicate the video from their services they found out how difficult it is to get a system to stop doing what it’s been designed to do. Facebook alone had to remove it 1.5 million times in the first 24 hours. This shouldn’t have been a shock. After all, they were the ones who designed it that way.
In 2014, Facebook ran an experiment on over 600,000 human beings using their service. Facebook filled those users’ newsfeeds with overwhelmingly negative news to see if it had an effect on those users’ mental health. Facebook ran a human mental health experiment on its own users without their consent. Obviously, anyone with mental health issues had no opportunity to opt-out. Neither did anyone else. It was designed that way.
The effect of what you put into the fabric of society should always be a key consideration in your work. We need to understand the problem at the fundamental level, Social media applications allow you to target a certain group by race, gender or geographic location for a particular advertisement. The culture has been designed to feed you data or expose you to certain advertisements.
Victor Papanek, who offered us a path toward developing spines in Design for the Real World, referred to designers as gatekeepers. We have a skill-set that people need to get things made, and that skill-set includes an inquiring mind and a strong spine. We need to measure more than profit. We need to slow down and measure what our work is doing out there in the world. We need to measure the impact on the people whose lives we’re affecting. Then, we need to design things that improve the lives of the people who make them and those who use them; design things which positively impact society at large.
March 30, 2023
The need for designers to fear the consequences of their work
No design exists in a vacuum, it impacts a well-run system called society at large. We need to fear the consequences of our work more than the cleverness of our ideas.
Design is an action-oriented discipline. We make things! They go out into the world and have an impact on others. People don’t appreciate our interfaces, they use them to get things done in their life. The decisions we make have ramifications. What you bring into the world is your responsibility. We cannot be surprised when a database we designed to catalogue immigrants gets those immigrants deported or developed an algorithm to target a specific section of people for advertisement.
A white supremacist opened fire on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, during an evening prayer service on March 15, 2019. He assassinated fifty people. He had a camera on him and was live-streaming his act of terror. The video went viral across multiple platforms, despite a public outcry to take it down. The platforms were doing precisely what they were designed to do: spread, sensationalize, and drive engagement. As teams across the major platforms attempted to eradicate the video from their services they found out how difficult it is to get a system to stop doing what it’s been designed to do. Facebook alone had to remove it 1.5 million times in the first 24 hours. This shouldn’t have been a shock. After all, they were the ones who designed it that way.
In 2014, Facebook ran an experiment on over 600,000 human beings using their service. Facebook filled those users’ newsfeeds with overwhelmingly negative news to see if it had an effect on those users’ mental health. Facebook ran a human mental health experiment on its own users without their consent. Obviously, anyone with mental health issues had no opportunity to opt-out. Neither did anyone else. It was designed that way.
The effect of what you put into the fabric of society should always be a key consideration in your work. We need to understand the problem at the fundamental level, Social media applications allow you to target a certain group by race, gender or geographic location for a particular advertisement. The culture has been designed to feed you data or expose you to certain advertisements.
Victor Papanek, who offered us a path toward developing spines in Design for the Real World, referred to designers as gatekeepers. We have a skill-set that people need to get things made, and that skill-set includes an inquiring mind and a strong spine. We need to measure more than profit. We need to slow down and measure what our work is doing out there in the world. We need to measure the impact on the people whose lives we’re affecting. Then, we need to design things that improve the lives of the people who make them and those who use them; design things which positively impact society at large.
March 30, 2023
The need for designers to fear the consequences of their work
No design exists in a vacuum, it impacts a well-run system called society at large. We need to fear the consequences of our work more than the cleverness of our ideas.
Design is an action-oriented discipline. We make things! They go out into the world and have an impact on others. People don’t appreciate our interfaces, they use them to get things done in their life. The decisions we make have ramifications. What you bring into the world is your responsibility. We cannot be surprised when a database we designed to catalogue immigrants gets those immigrants deported or developed an algorithm to target a specific section of people for advertisement.
A white supremacist opened fire on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, during an evening prayer service on March 15, 2019. He assassinated fifty people. He had a camera on him and was live-streaming his act of terror. The video went viral across multiple platforms, despite a public outcry to take it down. The platforms were doing precisely what they were designed to do: spread, sensationalize, and drive engagement. As teams across the major platforms attempted to eradicate the video from their services they found out how difficult it is to get a system to stop doing what it’s been designed to do. Facebook alone had to remove it 1.5 million times in the first 24 hours. This shouldn’t have been a shock. After all, they were the ones who designed it that way.
In 2014, Facebook ran an experiment on over 600,000 human beings using their service. Facebook filled those users’ newsfeeds with overwhelmingly negative news to see if it had an effect on those users’ mental health. Facebook ran a human mental health experiment on its own users without their consent. Obviously, anyone with mental health issues had no opportunity to opt-out. Neither did anyone else. It was designed that way.
The effect of what you put into the fabric of society should always be a key consideration in your work. We need to understand the problem at the fundamental level, Social media applications allow you to target a certain group by race, gender or geographic location for a particular advertisement. The culture has been designed to feed you data or expose you to certain advertisements.
Victor Papanek, who offered us a path toward developing spines in Design for the Real World, referred to designers as gatekeepers. We have a skill-set that people need to get things made, and that skill-set includes an inquiring mind and a strong spine. We need to measure more than profit. We need to slow down and measure what our work is doing out there in the world. We need to measure the impact on the people whose lives we’re affecting. Then, we need to design things that improve the lives of the people who make them and those who use them; design things which positively impact society at large.
March 30, 2023
The need for designers to fear the consequences of their work
No design exists in a vacuum, it impacts a well-run system called society at large. We need to fear the consequences of our work more than the cleverness of our ideas.
Design is an action-oriented discipline. We make things! They go out into the world and have an impact on others. People don’t appreciate our interfaces, they use them to get things done in their life. The decisions we make have ramifications. What you bring into the world is your responsibility. We cannot be surprised when a database we designed to catalogue immigrants gets those immigrants deported or developed an algorithm to target a specific section of people for advertisement.
A white supremacist opened fire on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, during an evening prayer service on March 15, 2019. He assassinated fifty people. He had a camera on him and was live-streaming his act of terror. The video went viral across multiple platforms, despite a public outcry to take it down. The platforms were doing precisely what they were designed to do: spread, sensationalize, and drive engagement. As teams across the major platforms attempted to eradicate the video from their services they found out how difficult it is to get a system to stop doing what it’s been designed to do. Facebook alone had to remove it 1.5 million times in the first 24 hours. This shouldn’t have been a shock. After all, they were the ones who designed it that way.
In 2014, Facebook ran an experiment on over 600,000 human beings using their service. Facebook filled those users’ newsfeeds with overwhelmingly negative news to see if it had an effect on those users’ mental health. Facebook ran a human mental health experiment on its own users without their consent. Obviously, anyone with mental health issues had no opportunity to opt-out. Neither did anyone else. It was designed that way.
The effect of what you put into the fabric of society should always be a key consideration in your work. We need to understand the problem at the fundamental level, Social media applications allow you to target a certain group by race, gender or geographic location for a particular advertisement. The culture has been designed to feed you data or expose you to certain advertisements.
Victor Papanek, who offered us a path toward developing spines in Design for the Real World, referred to designers as gatekeepers. We have a skill-set that people need to get things made, and that skill-set includes an inquiring mind and a strong spine. We need to measure more than profit. We need to slow down and measure what our work is doing out there in the world. We need to measure the impact on the people whose lives we’re affecting. Then, we need to design things that improve the lives of the people who make them and those who use them; design things which positively impact society at large.
