The 3 Rs of Ethical Design
Superficial Design
Three years ago, my friend Aarron Walter, a very talented experience designer and director of user experience at MailChimp, wrote an article popularising what he calls emotional interface design. In it, he repurposed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in pyramid form, to explain the various tiers of experience design.
IMAGE-MASLOW’S PYRAMID
Aarron’s pyramid focusses on the characteristics of products, starting with functionality as a base and building through reliability and usability to reach pleasure and delight in the highest tier (the equivalent of self actualisation in Maslow’s hierarchy).
IMAGE-AARRON’S PYRAMID
Just as with Maslow’s hierarchy, in the hierarchy of experience design, the lower tiers are prerequisites for the higher ones. Unless your product is functional, reliable, and usable, any delighters you attempt to add will most likely have a negative effect on your audience.
This is a solid model and it can be used as a framework to create delightful experiences. With it, we can create products that empower and delight people in the immediate term.
In the article, Aarron even used one of my iPhone apps, Feathers, as a case study. Feathers was a Twitter app that brought delight to great many people at the time (it even got Stephen Fry back into tweeting after he’d left Twitter). But Feathers is also a beautiful demonstration of the limitation of this model. While making Feathers, I was purely focussed on creating a great short-term experience. What thought, if any, did I give to its longer-term effects? At the very least, by thoughtlessly using the Twitter API, I was helping add value to a closed silo.
This model of design, while valid, is woefully incomplete. It shows only part of the picture — and not the most important part of the picture, at that.
What it’s missing is an ethical base.
Without an ethical base, we cannot guarantee that the experiences we create will not be superficial, manipulative, and morally vacuous.
Design without ethics is manipulation.
It’s time we made ethics the base of our pyramid.
The 3 Rs of Ethical Design
IMAGE-ARAL’S PYRAMID
The trifecta of ethical design are the 3 Rs: respect for human rights and dignity, respect for human effort, and respect for human experience. All of which boils down to a simple concept: respect for the human.
The problem with mainstream technology today is that it is either ignorant of, or wilfully ignores, the base tier of ethical design.
Most mainstream technology does not respect human rights. When you build products that do not respect human rights, you are not building products for people, you are building products that use people.
Our whole pyramid today is built this way: not for people, but on the backs of people.
IMAGE OF PYRAMID BUILT ON PEOPLE’S BACKS.
Most mainstream technology today is malware.
Mainstream technology, built on the Silicon Valley model of surveillance capitalism, treats people as products to be sold.
We can no longer afford to mince our words. Let’s be upfront about what we do in our industry:
We sell people.
We sell you.
Not your body. No, of course not, we frown upon that practice these days… but everything else about you that makes you who you are.
Factory farms for humans
Devoid of an ethical base, we worship at the altar of the Libertarian Church of Latter Day Billionaires. We build factory farms for humans and extract as much as we can from this bountiful and valuable resource.
We design our products to be addictive. Because to us you are a user. It’s no coincidence that only one other profession uses that terminology:: drug dealers.
We must get you addicted because the more you use our products, the more value we get. We need your data. Your data is what we feed on. If you do not use the treadmills we provide, we cannot feed. So we give you beautiful treadmills to run on. When we improve the treadmill, it’s as much for your benefit as the massage given to Kobe beef is for the benefit of the cows. That is to say, it’s not for your benefit at all. We’re just trying to make our product better. That product, is you. You’re what we sell to our customers. Information about you. Insight about you.
You.
Everything about you but your corporeal self.
We once had a lucrative business that sold people’s bodies. We called it slavery. Today, the dominant business in technology is to sell everything about you except your body. We have to ask ourselves what do we call this practice if not Slavery 2.0?
In a world we increasingly filter, experience, and influence via digital platforms we neither own nor control, this new form of digital servitude has the potential to be every bit as limiting of our freedoms as its corporeal cousin. Don’t forget that what the corporations know about us, the governments know. And the lines between the corporation and government have blurred to the point where they are merely gradients, connected by the influence of corporate finance in public policymaking and circulated between via revolving doors. Devoid of ethics and institutionally corrupt we have designed our digital world — and thus our future — as a real-time Camera Panopticon where everything that you are can be used against you.
The saddest effect of all of this is that we no longer live in a democracy: we live in a corporatocracy.
To design a different future, to veer towards a different path, we must start with a new framework of design: one that, at its core, respects the human.
Surviving the Anthropocene
If our species is to survive the Anthropocene, we must abandon our shortsighted and primitive capitalistic/libertarian instincts — instincts based on our base evolutionary traits. These traits — grabbing the next source of glucose and craving the next hit of dopamine — had localised ramifications in the past. Today, however, we have the ability to destroy our own habitat. Not the world, or anything silly like that (bacteria will survive in places we haven’t even visited yet, no matter how hard we try to fuck things up). Just the habitat of one, fragile species:
Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
And yet, thankfully, we are not merely the sum of our base evolutionary traits. We also have higher-order evolutionary traits. We form families and communities. We take care of each other. We feel empathy for others. These traits have contributed to our survival as much as, and — in the latter stages of history, perhaps even more so — than our base traits. It is precisely these higher-order traits that we must embrace.
Not because we are altruistic. But because we are selfish and smart, instead of selfish and stupid.
The definition of selfishness in the Anthropocene
We will not survive the Anthropocene unless we can define selfishness correctly for this new era.
And before you think me a libertarian, let me quickly state how little I think of them.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not abhor libertarians because they’re selfish but because they are stupid. What else can you call the adherents of a quasi-religion who fail to even define their core tenet — selfishness — correctly for the era they live in?
Libertarians define selfishness in the shortest of timeframes and within the bounds of the basest of evolutionary traits. While once the ramifications of the actions of such shortsighted buffoons would have merely had localised ramifications (a village destroyed here, a lake poisoned there), in the Anthropocene, their actions, being as they are amplified by technology (for technology is a multiplier) may well spell the end of our species.
If our species is to survive the era of the human, we need a new definition of selfishness.
The rate at which our technology amplifies the ramifications of our shortsighted actions means that it is no longer merely future generations that will feel their cost. It is our very generation. A definition of selfishness for the Anthropocene, therefore, must seek to minimise those ramifications — if not for anyone else, simply for ourselves. Plainly, it means that we cannot afford to take decisions that merely provide us with short-term gains because the costs, due to the scale to which they are amplified to by our technology — will affect ourselves also.
The definition of selfishness in the Anthropocene cannot exclude the health of the commons and a sustainable social topology. Individual freedoms and a healthy commons, far from being diametrically opposed, are prerequisites for one another.
Designing a future for our species
The future we design must be one where the topology of society and the topology of technology are distributed in nature.
A network without centres.
A system that scales horizontally; sustainably.
The greatest existential challenge of our time is tackling the systemic inequality that threatens to destroy both the very fabric of our societies and our habitat. Systemic inequality so magnified by network effects that last year an Oxfam study found that 85 people have the same wealth as half of the world’s poorest population combined (that’s 3.5 billion people). Systemic inequality so outrageous that this year, for the first time, 1% of the world’s population will have more wealth than the rest of the 99% combined.
The corporatocracy we live in — the new feudalism — is unsustainable. If Capitalism has won, the battle was not against any other ideology but against humanity itself. If Capitalism has won, it is us, human beings that have lost. Not only our present but the potential of what we could become. We have mortgaged our future — and the potential of what we could achieve — to those who build infrastructure with us, instead of for us.
An existential battle between two species: humans and corporations.
Capitalism may have won the battle, but we must make sure it doesn’t win the war. And make no mistake, this is a war. It is a war at the species-level between corporations and individuals.
It is the defining war of our era that all others stem from.
We created corporations in our own image. And yet we stripped them of all that tempers our hand. We infused them with the worst of our base-level evolutionary traits. We created a monster. If a corporation was a person, it would be a psychopath. And, instead of locking these psychopaths away, we rewarded them with the greatest rewards we can muster. They grew. They took on a life of their own.
Corporations are not people.
They are a new species.
A new Siphonophorae—like-species made up of colonies of people — all with specialised roles but acting to a greater programming of the corporate organism itself. It is a new species of our own design. Artificial intelligence isn’t brewing in some computer somewhere, it’s the veritable Game of Life we are seeing played out from the basic ruleset we designed when we created the algorithm that is the publicly-traded corporation.
If anything, the more interconnected we become via the technologies that learn from us, the tighter we are coupled to organism — providing it with the intelligence it needs to evolve into better versions of itself. Better at feeding on the thing it needs to continue growing: us. All the while, as we get more and more specialised in our tasks, just as with Siphonophorae, we lose our ability to function outside of the organism.
The rules of this Game of Life are simple: provide quarter-on-quarter growth. Use people to achieve this. The people themselves are absolved of any personal responsibility while following the rules. Let mob mentality kick in. The biggest psychopath wins. Scale vertically. Grow. Rinse. Repeat. Ad infinitum.
Only, the world — as large as it may be — is not an infinite resource. In the words of Kenneth Boulding, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
Our corporate Game of Life, just like its purely algorithmic counterpart, is much akin to a culture of bacteria in a petri dish. Take some bacteria, provide them with nutrients, and seal the petri dish. The bacteria will grow from one generation to the next until they reach their most successful, most populous state one generation before they go extinct due to lack of resources.
The result of uncontrolled growth in a closed system is extinction due to exhaustion of resources. In case you’re wondering, yes, the Earth is a closed system with finite resources and we’re the bacteria in this analogy.
On planting a new tree and building bridges
Regardless of anything I’ve written here, I believe we can fight this. I believe we can change course. It won’t be easy. It won’t be painless. And it will not evolutionary. It will be revolutionary.
We planted a bullshit seed and it has grown into a bullshit tree. We climbed into its branches and we made our homes and now we wonder why we eat bullshit fruit.
Pruning the branches of a tree does not change the nature of the tree. We cannot be evolutionary in our approach.
It’s time to climb down from the tree, walk a few steps away, and plant a new seed.
A seed based on reason, ethics, and compassion. For in the Anthropocene, compassion for others is compassion for yourself. It is not altruism, it is selfishness.
As this tree grows, we must build bridges to the old one. We must make it as easy as possible for others to cross over from the bullshit tree. We must do this, for any new system that has succeeded has done so because it has managed to wean from that which came before.
This is design.
Design alters the status quo; decoration merely makes it more palatable.
It’s time we started practicing design, not decoration.
No less than the survival of our species depends on it.