archive.Joe Lamantia.com

A quick anouncement: part two of the series on ethics and experience design Designing Ethical Experiences: Some Practical Suggestions, is just live at UXMatters. In this followup to the first installment, you’ll find a fiarly extensive set of suggested techniques for resolving conflicts – ethical and otherwise – during the strategy and design phases of experience design efforts. If you’ve had issues with ethics or conflict during a design effort, these simple techniques should be a useful starting point.

Looking ahead, part three of the series will explore recent research on the way that people make decisions with ethical implications in business settings (good for designers who want to be aware of their own methods and states of mind, and how those drive design work), and the importance of neutral models in making ethical design decisions.

Here’s an excerpt:

Thankfully, successfully addressing ethical challenges during design does not require the creation of a formal or detailed code of ethics–or the creation of a professional body that would sustain such an effort. Designers can use the fact that ethical questions often appear first in the form of conflicts–in values, goals, mental models, or otherwise–to manage ethical dilemmas as simply another form of conflict. Further, we can treat conflict as a natural, though often unexplored element of the larger context user experience always seeks to understand. With this framing, conflict becomes a new layer of integrated experiences–a layer that encompasses ethical dilemmas. We can pragmatically incorporate this new layer of ethical dilemmas into our existing frameworks for user experience.

My slides from Blogtalk 2008 are available online now: I went through a lot of ideas quickly, so this is a good way to follow along at your own pace…

FYI: This version of the deck includes presenters notes – I’ll upload a (larger!) view-only version once I’m back from holiday in lovely Eire.

My presentation slides from the Ethics Panel at EuroIA 2007 – titled Designing Ethically – Communicating Conflict: Design For the Integrated Experiences of the Future – are available from Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/moJoe. Ethics was a challenging and fascinating subject to take on, and it prompted some great discussion with the audience (even at 7pm, after a full day of sessions…)

Many thanks to fellow panelists Olly Wright and Thom Froehlich, and all who planned, organized, attended, spoke, volunteered, or otherwise contributed to EuroIA 2007. As you can see from the flickr photostream, it was worth the trip to Barcelona! I’m already looking forward to next year’s event in Amsterdam.

Here’s a quick description of the presentation:

“What does the future of design hold? Greater ethical challenges. In the coming world of integrated experiences, design will face increasing ethical dilemmas born of the conflicts between broader, diverse groups of users in social media; new hybrids such as the SPIME which bridges the physical and virtual environments simultaneously, and the DIY shift that changes the role of designers from creators of elegant point solutions, to the authors of elegant systems and frameworks used by others for their own expressive and functional purposes. To better prepare designers for the increased complexity, connectedness, and awareness included in the coming future, here are some practical suggestions for easily addressing conflict during the design of integrated experiences, by using known and familiar experience design methods and techniques.”

*Apologies for another announcement posting* but now that the program is final, I can mention that I’ll be speaking at EuroIA 2007 in lovely Barcelona, as part of the panel Perspectives on Ethics, moderated by Olly Wright. My presentation discusses conflict and ethics as an aspect of design for social online environments.

I shared some initial thoughts on this (under served) area last year, in a short post titled Conflict-Aware Design: Accounting For Conflict In User Experiences. The essential message of this post – and the thing I’m thinking about most regarding the question of conflict – is “conflict equals interest, and interest should be a focus for design.” The panel will be the forum for sharing promised (but not complete) follow-up postings.

While prepping the submission, I was working with this treatment for the topic.

Conflict is a fundamental component of human character and relations, with important ethical dimensions. Yet conflict rarely appears as an explicit consideration during the process of designing the experiences, architectures, systems, or environments that make up the new social and participatory media we use daily. Now that media are social, conflict is inevitable.

How can (or should) designers ethically address conflict within design efforts? Does an ethical framework for design require us to manage conflict in character and relations actively? What mechanisms or social structures should designers use to address conflict within new experiences? Are there new kinds of conflict created or necessitated by the social and participatory environments emerging now?

Some specific areas of discussion: privacy, identity, ownership, responsibility, speech.

I’d love any thoughts on the topic, the treatment, the implications, etc.

Fellow panelists at EuroIA include:

• Olly Wright, Media Catalyst, NL
• Thomas J. Froehlich, Kent State University, US
• special mystery panelist…

Barcelona is a magnificent city…

The full conference program is available at this address http://www.euroia.org/Programme.aspx, and the roster of speakers along is worth the trip to Barcelona.

And DrupalCon Barcelona happens at the same time – I wonder what sort of cross-pollination will emerge…?

Viva Catalunya!