Designers won’t save the world — but hopefully won’t ruin it either
By: Axel Norén
Tags: Ethics, UX, Future, User Experience, Responsibility

For the past two weeks, I have been diving into the ethical dilemmas of our modern society. Most people today use some digital service or platform that collects data about us, but we are not all aware of the how and why of this data collection. Even less of us are probably considering the effects these services have had and can potentially have on our society as a whole. To precipitate our designs’ consequences is sometimes impossible to do, but none-the-less, such an important part of the design process. We as designers usually try to shape the future towards something better, but even with this clear intention to do good, we can never be completely sure about what this might lead to. We are largely responsible for the product we design but are we accountable for all the possible outcomes and scenarios?

Does Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite make him accountable for what it is used for? Most of us would probably think; of course not, he never blew people up. And as his intentions might be disputable, there have been some good things coming out of it as well. It would be unfair to blame him for his design’s destructive usages, but he probably reaped the rewards of it nonetheless.

This example might be quite a tangent compared to designing a networking tool, but as these tools expand and evolve, the effects can be just as big or harmful as explosions. There are frameworks to consider these effects, but no matter how deep they go, we can never be sure we didn’t miss certain aspects. A question relating to scale, like “what would happen if everyone in the world would use our product,” is useful to consider but very hard to predict correctly. The answers also change over time and as other designs start to interact with it and create new synergistic effects. These complex predictions might seem like guessing where the needle will end up in the haystack, but that doesn’t make them less important. If you know the approximate area where the needle starts its journey and narrow the search by any amount, this dramatically increases the chance of success. The result will be easier and easier to find, as long as we never stop trying.

One factor in all of this is ‘behavioral contagion,’ which refers to the propensity for a person to copy a certain behavior from the people they are exposed to. This expression was minted over a hundred years ago, and its effect on human society has grown through the rise of social media and other rapid communication tools. ‘Behavioral contagion’ was first used to explain the undesirable aspects of behaviors in crowds. It has, in my opinion, never been more powerful than today, and as crowds have evolved in many ways, it is also applicable to the more abstract ones that we reach on our social media platforms.

As the possible reach has grown to previously unforeseen proportions, where one person can reach a crowd of millions within minutes: behaviors, social conduct, moral guidelines, and even ethical principles are easier to influence than ever before.

Photo by Adem AY on Unsplash

The now very famous but not so well understood algorithms of Tiktok, Instagram, or Facebook greatly contribute to this phenomenon; our feeds are adapted to suit our interests and keep us browsing. The more we interact with the things we like, the more we get fed things related to these things, and consequently, the variety of information is reduced to focus on what we seem to want most. In these proverbial bubbles, we get a streamlined version of reality that either shows us what we enjoy or the opposite: the things we hate the most.

When our source of information gets more homogeneous, we tend to overestimate our cognitive group’s size and importance, which can easily lead to polarization: creating an increasingly black or white world view. This over-simplification of our complex world is dangerous in several ways and especially for our often very fragile democratic systems of government. It can open the door to extremist opinions we see growing around the world today. It correlates with issues like what-about-ism, hate-speech, and bigotry as many fall victim to the fallacy of the single cause or false dilemmas.

The informal single cause fallacy occurs when we assume a single, simple cause of an outcome when it, in reality, was caused by a large number of causes and could probably only reach this outcome when combined.

False dilemmas are dualistic statements that try to convey that there are only two choices available. It is widespread in politics and propaganda; Are you a Republican or a Democrat?, Pro-Life or Pro-Choice? and other choices where the issue is vastly more complex than right vs. wrong, and might as well be a choice of wrong vs. wrong or right vs. right.

Photo by Brian Wertheim on Unsplash

As the future is being ideated, designed, and then analyzed, the one principle of modern design thinking I want to stress more than any is iteration. We can never design the perfect future because the different outcomes’ causality is far more complex and detailed than any design team in the world could consider completely. That’s true even before we try to consider random factors like natural disasters, world wars, impact events, or some other force majeure that would radically change the entire context of human life. Therefore designers who are trying to consider the ethical implications around their work need to, most of all, be reactive when new consequences arise. This is, in practice, not an easy task, especially since they often are very vague.

Several studies have been published around the correlation between mental health problems, suicide, and internet usage, and they consistently get results to support this. Between 2009 and 2017, rates of depression among kids ages 14 to 17 increased by more than 60%, and today researchers agree that there is a significant crisis in mental health growing, especially in developed countries with large numbers of adolescents and young adults that are accustomed to heavy technology usage.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

Social media and other forms of internet communication are mostly curated by the end users and are therefore not easily controlled or regulated. As such, we might not ever be able to design a product like these without expecting changes in our social structure and the issues that consequently may result in. However, we also get new possibilities to help people through these platforms, and perhaps we can find the solutions inside the potential culprit. If we can nudge our platforms toward inclusion and tolerance of different points of view, instead of the polarizing and cyber-bullying tendencies we often see today, the effects may be contained and made to help our society and this growing mental health crisis.

Even though the evidence builds on social media’s negative consequences, we should be very mindful before singling out social media as the culprit. Every generation before us have said similar things about new technologies, and as the rise of social media is one of the most significant changes in modern society, the effects we see in mental health is probably not due to just one thing but several joint factors, just as the fallacies surrounding polarization can teach us.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

To conclude, I believe a positive future depends on new and better designs, but we can never expect to get anything right the first time. To be responsible as a designer means being humble about what our designs might lead to. When new issues arise, big or small, we must stay able to admit them and willing to change, no matter the financial or personal losses that might entail. In our modern society, where success often gets measured by material possessions, we need to try and shift our motivations towards the betterment of all instead of our own recognition and/or bank account. We need to shift our mindstate from competing against each other to instead competing as one team versus a gloomy future. We need to be the first to admit our failures and always hold ourselves accountable and willing to change our designs when and wherever we see the need. If we succeed, designers might still not be able to save the world, but at least we might not ruin it.

-Axel Norén, student of life and UX. This paper was an assignment for a class on the ethics of UX design through Hyper Island.

Sources for the scientific studies mentioned in the article:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3477910/