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Autor: Chasles, François J.
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A family buys a house they can’t afford. They can’t make their monthly mortgage payments, so they borrow money from the Mob. Now they’re in debt to the bank and the Mob, live in fear of losing their home, and must do whatever their creditors tell them to do.

Welcome to the internet, 2019.

Buying something you can’t afford, and borrowing from organizations that don’t have your (or your customers’) best interest at heart, is the business plan of most internet startups. It’s why our digital services and social networks in 2019 are a garbage fire of lies, distortions, hate speech, tribalism, privacy violations, snake oil, dangerous idiocy, deflected responsibility, and whole new categories of unpunished ethical breaches and crimes.

From optimistically conceived origins and message statements about making the world a better place, too many websites and startups have become the leading edge of bias and trauma, especially for marginalized and at-risk groups.

Why (almost) everything sucks

Twitter, for instance, needs a lot of views for advertising to pay at the massive scale its investors demand. A lot of views means you can’t be too picky about what people share. If it’s misogynists or racists inspiring others who share their heinous beliefs to bring back the 1930s, hey, it’s measurable. If a powerful elected official’s out-of-control tweeting reduces churn and increases views, not only can you pay your investors, you can even take home a bonus. Maybe it can pay for that next meditation retreat.

You can cloak this basic economic trade-off in fifty layers of bullshit—say you believe in freedom of speech, or that the antidote to bad speech is more speech—but the fact is, hate speech is profitable. It’s killing our society and our planet, but it’s profitable. And the remaining makers of Twitter—the ones whose consciences didn’t send them packing years ago—no longer have a choice. The guy from the Mob is on his way over, and the vig is due.

Not to single out Twitter, but this is clearly the root cause of its seeming indifference to the destruction hate speech is doing to society…and will ultimately do to the platform. (But by then Jack will be able to afford to meditate full-time.)

Other companies do other evil things to pay their vig. When you owe the Mob, you have no choice. Like sell our data. Or lie about medical research.

There are internet companies (like Basecamp, or like Automattic, makers of WordPress.com, where I work) that charge money for their products and services, and use that money to grow their business. I wish more internet companies could follow that model, but it’s hard to retrofit a legitimate business model to a product that started its life as free.

And there are even some high-end news publications, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, that survive on a combination of advertising and flexible paywalls. But these options are not available to most digital publications and businesses.

Return with me to those Halcyon days…

Websites and internet startups used to be you and your friends making cool stuff for your other friends, and maybe building new friendships and even small communities in the process. (Even in 2019, that’s still how some websites and startups begin—as labors of love, fashioned by idealists in their spare time.)

Because they are labors of love; because we’ve spent 25 years training people to believe that websites, and news, and apps, and services should be free; because, when we begin a project, we can scarcely believe anyone will ever notice or care about it—for these reasons and more, the things we make digitally, especially on the web, are offered free of charge. We labor on, excited by positive feedback, and delighted to discover that, if we keep at it, our little community will grow.

Most such labors of love disappear after a year or two, as the creators drift out of touch with each other, get “real” jobs, fall in love, start families, or simply lose interest due to lack of attention from the public or the frustrations of spending weekends and holidays grinding away at an underappreciated site or app while their non-internet friends spend those same hours either having fun or earning money.

Along came money

But some of these startup projects catch on. And when they do, a certain class of investor smells ROI. And the naive cofounders, who never expected their product or service to really get anywhere, can suddenly envision themselves rich and Zuckerberg-famous. Or maybe they like the idea of quitting their day job, believing in themselves, and really going for it. After all, that is an empowering and righteous vision.

Maybe they believe that by taking the initial investment, they can do more good—that their product, if developed further, can actually help people. This is often the motivation behind agreeing to an initial investment deal, especially in categories like healthcare.

Or maybe the founders are problem solvers. Existing products or services in a given category have a big weakness. The problem solvers are sure that their idea is better. With enough capital, and a slightly bigger team, they can show the world how to do it right. Most inventions that have moved humankind forward followed exactly this path. It should lead to a better world (and it sometimes does). It shouldn’t produce privacy breaches and fake medicine and election-influencing bots and all the other plagues of our emerging digital civilization. So why does it?

Content wants to be paid

Primarily it is because these businesses have no business model. They were made and given away free. Now investors come along who can pay the founders, buy them an office, give them the money to staff up, and even help with PR and advertising to help them grow faster.

Now there are salaries and insurance and taxes and office space and travel and lecture tours and sales booths at SXSW, but there is still no charge for the product.

And the investor seeks a big return.

And when the initial investment is no longer enough to get the free-product company to scale to the big leagues, that’s when the really big investors come in with the really big bucks. And the company is suddenly famous overnight, and “everybody” is using the product, and it’s still free, and the investors are still expecting a giant payday.

Like I said—a house you can’t afford, so you go into debt to the bank and the Mob.

The money trap

Here it would be easy to blame capitalism, or at least untrammeled, under-regulated capitalism, which has often been a source of human suffering—not that capitalism, properly regulated, can’t also be a force for innovation which ameliorates suffering. That’s the dilemma for our society, and where you come down on free markets versus governmental regulation of businesses should be an intellectual decision, but these days it is a label, and we hate our neighbors for coming down a few degrees to the left or right of us. But I digress and oversimplify, and this isn’t a complaint about late stage capitalism per se, although it may smell like one.

No, the reason small companies created by idealists too frequently turn into consumer-defrauding forces for evil has to do with the amount of profit each new phase of investor expects to receive, and how quickly they expect to receive it, and the fact that the products and services are still free. And you know what they say about free products.

Nothing fails like success

A friend who’s a serial entrepreneur has started maybe a dozen internet businesses over the span of his career. They’ve all met a need in the marketplace. As a consequence, they’ve all found customers, and they’ve all made a profit. Yet his investors are rarely happy.

“Most of my startups have the decency to fail in the first year,” one investor told him. My friend’s business was taking in several million dollars a year and was slowly growing in staff and customers. It was profitable. Just not obscenely so.

And internet investors don’t want a modest return on their investment. They want an obscene profit right away, or a brutal loss, which they can write off their taxes. Making them a hundred million for the ten million they lent you is good. Losing their ten million is also good—they pay a lower tax bill that way, or they use the loss to fold a company, or they make a profit on the furniture while writing off the business as a loss…whatever rich people can legally do under our tax system, which is quite a lot.

What these folks don’t want is to lend you ten million dollars and get twelve million back.

You and I might go, “Wow! I just made two million dollars just for being privileged enough to have money to lend somebody else.” And that’s why you and I will never have ten million dollars to lend anybody. Because we would be grateful for it. And we would see a free two million dollars as a life-changing gift from God. But investors don’t think this way.

We didn’t start the fire, but we roasted our weenies in it

As much as we pretend to be a religious nation, our society worships these investors and their profits, worships companies that turn these profits, worships above all the myth of overnight success, which we use to motivate the hundreds of thousands of workers who will work nights and weekends for the owners in hopes of cashing in when the stock goes big.

Most times, even if the stock does go big, the owner has found a way to devalue it by the time it does. Owners have brilliant advisers they pay to figure out how to do those things. You and I don’t.

A Christmas memory

I remember visiting San Francisco years ago and scoring an invitation to Twitter’s Christmas party through a friend who worked there at the time. Twitter was, at the time, an app that worked via SMS and also via a website. Period.

Some third-party companies, starting with my friends at Iconfactory, had built iPhone apps for people who wanted to navigate Twitter via their newfangled iPhones instead of the web. Twitter itself hadn’t publicly addressed mobile and might not even have been thinking about it.

Although Twitter was transitioning from a fun cult thing—used by bloggers who attended SXSW Interactive in 2007—to an emerging cultural phenomenon, it was still quite basic in its interface and limited in its abilities. Which was not a bad thing. There is art in constraint, value in doing one thing well. As an outsider, if I’d thought about it, I would have guessed that Twitter’s entire team consisted of no more than 10 or 12 wild-eyed, sleep-deprived true believers.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I showed up at the Christmas party and discovered I’d be sharing dinner with hundreds of designers, developers, salespeople, and executives instead of the handful I’d naively anticipated meeting. (By now, of course, Twitter employs many thousands. It’s still not clear to an outsider why so many workers are needed.)

But one thing is clear: somebody has to pay for it all.

Freemium isn’t free

Employees, let alone thousands of them, on inflated Silicon Valley engineer salaries, aren’t free. Health insurance and parking and meals and HR and travel and expense accounts and meetups and software and hardware and office space and amenities aren’t free. Paying for all that while striving to repay investors tenfold means making a buck any way you can.

Since the product was born free and a paywall isn’t feasible, Twitter must rely on that old standby: advertising. Advertising may not generate enough revenue to keep your hometown newspaper (or most podcasts and content sites) in business, but at Twitter’s scale, it pays.

It pays because Twitter has so many active users. And what keeps those users coming back? Too often, it’s the dopamine of relentless tribalism—folks whose political beliefs match and reinforce mine in a constant unwinnable war of words with folks whose beliefs differ.

Of course, half the antagonists in a given brawl may be bots, paid for in secret by an organization that wants to make it appear that most citizens are against Net Neutrality, or that most Americans oppose even the most basic gun laws, or that our elected officials work for lizard people. The whole system is broken and dangerous, but it’s also addictive, and we can’t look away. From our naive belief that content wants to be free, and our inability to create businesses that pay for themselves, we are turning our era’s greatest inventions into engines of doom and despair.

Your turn

So here we are. Now what do we do about it?

It’s too late for current internet businesses (victims of their own success) that are mortgaged to the hilt in investor gelt. But could the next generation of internet startups learn from older, stable companies like Basecamp, and design products that pay for themselves via customer income—products that profit slowly and sustainably, allowing them to scale up in a similarly slow, sustainable fashion?

The self-payment model may not work for apps and sites that are designed as modest amusements or communities, but maybe those kinds of startups don’t need to make a buck—maybe they can simply be labors of love, like the websites we loved in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Along those same lines, can the IndieWeb, and products of IndieWeb thinking like Micro.blog, save us? Might they at least provide an alternative to the toxic aspects of our current social web, and restore the ownership of our data and content? And before you answer, RTFM.

On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram? Tantek Çelik thinks so, and he’s been right about the web for nearly 30 years. (For more about what Tantek thinks, listen to our conversation in Episode № 186 of The Big Web Show.)
Are these approaches mere whistling against a hurricane? Are most web and internet users content with how things are? What do you think? Share your thoughts on your personal website (dust yours off!) or (irony ahoy!) on your indie or mainstream social networks of choice using hashtag #LetsFixThis. I can’t wait to see what you have to say.

Suddenly, I realized that the people next to me might be severely impacted by my work. I was having a quick lunch in the airport. A group of flight attendants sat down at the table next to me and started to prepare for their flight. For a while now, our design team had been working on futuristic concepts for the operations control center of these flight attendants’ airline, pushing ourselves to come up with innovative solutions enabled by the newest technologies. As the control center deals with all activities around flying planes, our concepts touched upon everything and everyone within the airline. How was I to know what the impact of my work would be on the lives of these flight attendants? And what about the lives of all the other people working at the airline? Ideally, we would have talked to all the types of employees in the company and tested our concepts with them. But, of course, there was no budget (or time) allocated to do so, not to mention we faced the hurdle of convincing (internal) stakeholders of the need. Not for the first time, I felt frustrated: practical, real-world constraints prevented me from assessing the impact and quality of my work. They prevented me from properly conducting ethical design.

What is ethical design?

Right, good question. A very comprehensive definition of ethical design can be found at Encyclopedia.com:

Design ethics concerns moral behavior and responsible choices in the practice of design. It guides how designers work with clients, colleagues, and the end users of products, how they conduct the design process, how they determine the features of products, and how they assess the ethical significance or moral worth of the products that result from the activity of designing.

In other words, ethical design is about the “goodness”—in terms of benefit to individuals, society, and the world—of how we collaborate, how we practice our work, and what we create. There’s never a black-and-white answer for whether design is good or bad, yet there are a number of areas for designers to focus on when considering ethics.

Usability

Nowadays usability has conquered a spot as a basic requirement for each interface; unusable products are considered design failures. And rightly so; we have a moral obligation as designers to create products that are intuitive, safe, and free from possibly life-threatening errors. We were all reminded of usability’s importance by last year’s accidental nuclear strike warning in Hawaii. What if, instead of a false-positive, the operator had broadcasted a false-negative?

Accessibility

Like usability, inclusive design has become a standard item in the requirement list of many designers and companies. (I will never forget that time someone tried to use our website with a screen reader—and got absolutely stuck at the cookie message.) Accessible design benefits all, as it attempts to cover as many needs and capabilities as possible. Yet for each design project, there are still a lot of tricky questions to answer. Who gets to benefit from our solutions? Who is (un)intentionally left out? Who falls outside the “target customer segment”?

Privacy

Another day, another Facebook privacy scandal. As we’re progressing into the Data Age, the topic of privacy has become almost synonymous with design ethics. There’s a reason why more and more people use DuckDuckGo as an alternative search engine to Google. Corporations have access to an abundance of personal information about consumers, and as designers we have the privilege—and responsibility—of using this information to shape products and services. We have to consider how much information is strictly necessary and how much people are willing to give up in exchange for services. And how can we make people aware of the potential risks without overloading them?

User involvement

Overlapping largely with privacy, this focus area is about how we deal with our users and what we do with the data that we collect from them. IDEO has recently published The Little Book of Design Research Ethics, which provides a comprehensive overview of the core principles and guidelines we should follow when conducting design research.

Persuasion

Ethics related to persuasion is about to what extent we may influence the behavior and thoughts of our users. It doesn’t take much to bring acceptable, “white hat” persuasion into gray or even dark territories. Conversion optimization, for example, can easily turn into “How do we squeeze out more revenue from our customers by turning their unconsciousness against them?” Prime examples include Netflix, which convinces us to watch, watch, and watch even more, and Booking.com, which barrages our senses with urgency and social pressure.

Focus

The current digital landscape is addictive, distracting, and competing for attention. Designing for focus is about responsibly handling people’s most valuable resource: time. Our challenge is to limit everything that disrupts our users’ attention, lower the addictiveness of products, and create calmness. The Center for Humane Technology has started a useful list of resources for this purpose.

Sustainability

What’s the impact of our work on the world’s environment, resources, and climate? Instead of continuously adding new features in the unrelenting scrum treadmill, how could we design for fewer? We’re in the position to create responsible digital solutions that enable sustainable consumer behavior and prevent overconsumption. For example, apps such as Optimiam and Too Good To Go allow people to order leftover food that would normally be thrashed. Or consider Mutum and Peerby, whose peer-to-peer platforms promote the sharing and reuse of owned products.

Society

The Ledger of Harms of the Center for Human Technology is a work-in-progress collection of the negative impacts that digital technology has on society, including topics such as relationships, mental health, and democracy. Designers who are mindful of society consider the impact of their work on the global economy, communities, politics, and health.

[caption id="attachment_7171650" align="alignnone" width="1200"] The focus areas of design ethics. That’s a lot to consider![/caption]

Ethics as an inconvenience

Ideally, in every design project, we should assess the potential impact in all of the above-mentioned areas and take steps to prevent harm. Yet there are many legitimate, understandable reasons why we often neglect to do so. It’s easy to have moral principles, yet in the real world, with the constraints that our daily life imposes upon us, it’s seldom easy to act according to those principles. We might simply say it’s inconvenient at the moment. That there’s a lack of time or budget to consider all the ethical implications of our work. That there are many more pressing concerns that have priority right now. We might genuinely believe it’s just a small issue, something to consider later, perhaps. Mostly, we are simply unaware of the possible consequences of our work. And then there’s the sheer complexity of it all: it’s simply too much to simultaneously focus on. When short on time, or in the heat of approaching deadlines and impatient stakeholders, how do you incorporate all of design ethics’ focus areas? Where do you even start?

Ethics as a structural practice

For these reasons, I believe we need to elevate design ethics to a more practical level. We need to find ways to make ethics not an afterthought, not something to be considered separately, but rather something that’s so ingrained in our process that not doing it means not doing design at all. The only way to overcome the “inconvenience” of acting ethically is to practice daily ethical design: ethics structurally integrated in our daily work, processes, and tools as designers. No longer will we have to rely on the exceptions among us; those extremely principled who are brave enough to stand up against the system no matter what kind of pressure is put upon them. Because the system will be on our side. By applying ethics daily and structurally in our design process, we’ll be able to identify and neutralize in a very early stage the potential for mistakes and misuse. We’ll increase the quality of our design and our practices simply because we’ll think things through more thoroughly, in a more conscious and structured manner. But perhaps most important is that we’ll establish a new standard for design. A standard that we can sell to our clients as the way design should be done, with ethical design processes and deliverables already included. A standard that can be taught to design students so that the newest generation of designers doesn’t know any better than to apply ethics, always.

How to practice daily ethical design?

At this point we’ve arrived at the question of how we can structurally integrate ethics into our design process. How do we make sure that our daily design decisions will result in a product that’s usable and accessible; protects people’s privacy, agency, and focus; and benefits both society and nature? I want to share with you some best practices that I’ve identified so far, and how I’ve tried to apply them during a recent project at Mirabeau. The goal of the project was to build a web application that provides a shaver manufacturer’s factory workers insight into the real-time availability of production materials.

Connect to your organization’s mission and values

By connecting our designs to the mission and values of the companies we work for, we can structurally use our design skills in a strategic manner, for moral purposes. We can challenge the company to truly live up to its promises and support it in carrying out its mission. This does, however, require you to be aware of the company’s values, and to compare these to your personal values. As I had worked with our example client before, I knew it was a company that takes care of its employees and has a strong focus on creating a better world. During the kick-off phase, we used a strategy pyramid to structure the client’s mission and values, and to agree upon success factors for the project. We translated the company’s customer-facing brand guidelines to employee-focused design principles that maintained the essence of the organization.

Keep track of your assumptions

Throughout our entire design process, we make assumptions for each decision that we take. By structurally keeping track of these assumptions, you’ll never forget about the limitations of your design and where the potential risks lie in terms of (harmful) impact on users, the project, the company, and society. In our example project, we listed our assumptions about user goals, content, and functionalities for each page of the application. If we were not fully sure about the value for end users, or the accuracy of a user goal, we marked it as a value assumption. When we were unsure if data could be made available, we marked this as a data (feasibility) assumption. If we were not sure whether a feature would add to the manufacturer’s business, we marked it as a scope assumption. Every week, we tested our assumptions with end users and business stakeholders through user tests and sprint demos. Each design iteration led to new questions and assumptions to be tested the next week.

Aim to be proven wrong

While our assumptions are the known unknowns, there are always unknown unknowns that we aren’t aware of but could be a huge risk for the quality and impact of our work. The only way we can identify these is by applying the scientific principle of falsifiability: seeking actively to be proven wrong. Only outsiders can point out to us what we miss as an individual or as a team. In our weekly user tests, we included factory workers and stakeholders with different disciplines, from different departments, and working in different contexts, to identify the edge cases that could break our concept. On one occasion, this made us reconsider the entirety of our concept. Still, we could have done better: although scalability to other factories was an important success factor, we were unable to gather input from those other factories during the project. We felt our only option was to mention this as a risk (“limit to scalability”).

Use the power of checklists

Let’s face it: we forget things. (Without scrolling up the page, can you name all the focus areas of design ethics?) This is where checklists help us out: they provide knowledge in the world, so that we don’t have to process it in our easily overwhelmed memory. Simple yet powerful, a checklist is an essential tool to practice daily ethical design. In our example project, we used checklists to maintain an overview of questions and assumptions to user test, checking whether we included our design principles properly, and assessing whether we complied to the client’s values, design principles, and the agreed-upon success factors. In hindsight, we could also have taken a moment during the concept phase to go through the list of focus areas for design ethics, as well as have taken a more structural approach to check accessibility guidelines.

The main challenge for daily ethical design

Most ethics focus areas are quite tangible, where design decisions have immediate, often visible effects. While certainly challenging in their own right, they’re relatively easy to integrate in our daily practice, especially for experienced designers. Society and the environment, however, are more intangible topics; the effects of our work in these areas are distant and uncertain. I’m sure that when Airbnb was first conceived, the founders did not consider the magnitude of its disruptive impact on the housing market. The same goes for Instagram, as its role in creating demand for fast fashion must have been hard to foresee. Hard, but not impossible. So how do we overcome this challenge and make the impact that we have on society and the environment more immediate, more daily?

Conduct Dark Reality sessions

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates used a series of questions to gradually uncover the invalidity of people’s beliefs. In a very similar way, we can uncover the assumptions and potential disastrous consequences of our concepts in a ‘Dark Reality’ session, a form of speculative design that focuses on stress-testing a concept with challenging questions. We have to ask ourselves—or even better, somebody outside our team has to ask us— questions such as, “What is the lifespan of your product? What if the user base will be in the millions? What are the long-term effects on economy, society, and the environment? Who benefits from your design? Who loses? Who is excluded? And perhaps most importantly, how could your design be misused? (For more of these questions, Alan Cooper provided a great list in his keynote at Interaction 18.) The back-and-forth Q&A of the Dark Reality session will help us consider and identify our concept’s weaknesses and potential consequences. As it is a team effort, it will spark discussion and uncover differences in team members’ ethical values. Moreover, the session will result in a list of questions and assumptions that can be tested with potential users and subject matter experts. In the project for the airline control center, it resulted in more consideration for the human role in automatization and how digital interfaces can continue to support human capabilities (instead of replacing them), and reflection on the role of airports in future society. The dark reality session is best conducted during the convergent parts of the double diamond, as these are the design phases in which we narrow down to realistic ideas. It’s vital to have a questioner from outside the team with strong interviewing skills and who doesn’t easily accept an answer as sufficient. There are helpful tools available to help structure the session, such as the Tarot Cards of Tech and these ethical tools.

Take a step back to go forward

As designers, we’re optimists by nature. We see the world as a set of problems that we can solve systematically and creatively if only we try hard enough. We intend well. However, merely having the intention to do good is not going to be enough. Our mindset comes with the pitfall of (dis)missing potential disastrous consequences, especially under pressure of daily constraints. That’s why we need to regularly, systematically take a step back and consider the future impact of our work. My hope is that the practical, structural mindset to ethics introduced in this article will help us agree on a higher standard for design.

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