So things have been busy here recently, hence the dearth of new posts.  The business is starting to take off, I’ve had some fascinating work and some of that is both return and on-going work – applying Psych principles to the User Experience, as well as more straight UX work.  So this post is going to be brief, which is a shame because it’s a HUGE and important issue – and one that I am constantly thinking about at the moment.

Ethics.

And changing the world.

And the power of design.

And the responsibility of design.

And how on Earth can design be perceived outside the sphere of the political.

Let’s start here: Alexis Madrigal has written a really nice post outlining the experiential side of facebook/internet addiction and has come up with a reasonably astute construct called ‘The Machine zone’.  This stuff is of course nothing but the result of a well-implemented intermittent schedule of reinforcement in a learning paradigm and (as I’ve talked about previously) is present in everything from gambling, gaming to fishing.  The difference is purely quantitative – Facebook, and a myriad other internet services/products – simply present this reward/contingency relationship in a more tightly, effectively coupled and strategically balanced ratio than elsewhere.  It’s purely a matter of degree.  So yeah – this exists everywhere and is fundamentally good for the bottom line of on-line services such as facebook.  In fact I was even proposing methods for leveraging this approach for a client the other day.  So… is it ethical?  And more to the point how do we, as designers, technicians, architects of the human experience, integrate ethics into what we do?

Because the impression I get is that much of the design world is quite non-reflective about its values – where design is seen as a fundamental good, and the potential solution to all sorts of ‘wicked’ problems, everything from incarceration to global poverty – without ever examining the dynamics (and…and I’ll say it right here… politics) that resulted in these problems in the first place.

Designing is political.  And until a framework exists where design can distinguish between a situation where design CAN help and those where it is better NOT to design for – we have a problem.  The kind of problem that the developing world has had since the advent of the Bretton Woods institutions coming charging in and telling individuals, communities and whole countries how they should behave, and in the process often screwing things up royally.

I have become involved in a small, just-starting-up ‘social-design’ collective here.  And it was interesting to note that after several hours of a workshop, multiple people presenting their projects, involving everything from Indigenous self-determination, prison rehabilitation building design and rust-belt city rejuvenation, there was no mention of either politics or economics.  None… at…all.  (Until I bought it up that is).

And this, I find worrying.  We, as designers, can go scurrying around trying to fix problems, but unless we stop and, at some point in the process, ask why this problem exists in the first place – then we are nothing but band-aid solutions to fundamental systemic problems.  And therefore – a part of those systems.  Which is not very ‘disruptive’ at all.

Anyway… this is the next book I need to read on the subject, hopefully I will have some more time to read/think/write about this soon – although to be honest, this is looking unlikely at the moment…