Dec 16, 2020

Finding Ethical Design

Incorporating ethics in the daily work of design

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As a visual designer on Google’s Material Design team, my job extends beyond creating visual styles. It includes work that isn’t explicitly “visual,” taking into account the functional experiences and factors of a person’s everyday life. This expansive approach to design – and a designer’s impact – is reflected in Material’s dark theme, a low-light interface I worked on that displays mostly dark surfaces to support screen use in dark environments. Another example can be seen in the team’s explorations on Digital Wellbeing, a project that takes physical and mental well-being as a central requirement for digital experiences.

Looking back on these projects I can see that they were enriched by design ethics – the moral principles that govern a designer’s decisions and goals. When I worked on Material’s dark theme and Digital Wellbeing projects, I didn’t have the vocabulary, knowledge, or perspective to articulate the ethical opportunities and tensions in the work. It wasn’t until I dedicated time to independently gain a deeper understanding of design ethics that I was able to recognize and respond to the social responsibility of design.

I slowed down to understand my role as a designer. I started looking at my contributions not as a set of tasks and deadlines, but as an extension of my larger social role. To work on Material’s design system, I realized, is to simultaneously participate in a much larger system.

Every designer defines their role differently, often in response to the type of work they do, how they do it, and who they do it for. But, however a designer understands their role, the social and cultural impacts of the work are inevitable. This means we need to make space in the definition of a designer’s work to include responsible practices that account for our impact.

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Space to learn

Making time and space to learn and apply ethical thinking is optimistic. It’s rarely afforded in project timelines, and is largely absent from design education. It’s unlikely that anyone will ask you to read and think about ethics, which puts the responsibility of learning on individual designers.

The more I learn, the more humility I feel. By expanding our exposure to ethical thinking, we can better understand who we are, what we could and should be doing, and why we’re doing the things we do. With that self-awareness, we’re in a much better place to understand where we can be most effective within design.

There’s no single way to apply ethics to a design practice; perhaps the only rule is to persistently look to the future as well as the past when designing. Our decisions are informed by the past; and because our decisions have an impact, they also inform futures that deserve to be proactively anticipated. Evaluating legacies and anticipating outcomes of design work can result in meaningful changes to the status quo and can be an act of hope.

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Making a choice

The most important thing I learned about design ethics is that what I choose to do or not do is a declaration of my ethics. A choice is a reminder that impactful decisions should be made with a deep awareness. Some of the choices that occur throughout the design process include:

  • actively understanding problems within the broader context of a continually evolving society.

  • asking why something is the way it is.

  • understanding the original context of a “best practice” and recognizing it may not apply in a new context.

  • considering any person or place that a project can affect to be a stakeholder.

  • not downgrading diverse human or environmental needs as edge cases unworthy of attention or investment.

  • avoiding reinforcing norms established through dominant culture narratives.

If you’re worried about the time or complexity of making ethical design choices, consider them as a tool for discovering new ideas and avoiding harmful ones. If you’re overwhelmed by where to start (I felt this way, too), I keep a growing collection of resources in an Are.na channel called Ethics Reader. It’s available for anyone interested in self-initiated learning, to understand the social, moral, ecological, and political ecosystems that we participate in as designers and tech workers.