archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Designers interested in the new challenges of ubiquitous computing / ubicomp, ethics, and the future of integrated experiences will enjoy Improving Our Ethical Choices: Managing the Imp of the Perverse, published in UXMatters on September 8th.

Ranging from Baudelaire to the Big Chill, with Edgar Allen Poe as guiding spirit, this fourth and final installment of the Designing Ethical Experiences series written for UXMatters provides practical suggestions – drawn mostly from business, psychology, and ethics researchers – on how to balance the tensions of difficult design choices. We’re not all philosophers, so as always the focus is on insights into how we make all types of decisions, not simply ethical dilemmas.

Aligning The Decision Cycle

Here’s an excerpt:

Ethical fading, the tension between our Want and Should Selves, and our natural tendency to create juicy rationalizations are powerful obstacles to the making of ethical design choices. As UX professionals, how can we better align our Want and Should Selves, ensuring that we create ethical experiences?

I learned a great deal about myself and my outlook while researching and writing this series of articles. I hope readers find the insights and tools valuable; either directly as a resource for dealing with ethical challenges of the new integrated experiences, or more generally during the day to day ebb and flow of design work.

The I.A. Podcast (by Jeff Parks of I.A. Consultants and BoxesandArrows podcast fame) just published the second of two interviews discussing research on ethics, design, social media, and conflict.

Play and download the second interview here.

Subscribe to the iTunes and feedburner feeds for the I.A. Podcast here.

These podcasts are based on the Designing Ethical Experiences series I’m writing for UXMatters: watch for publication of the final article later this summer.

Thanks again, Jeff!

Understanding Juicy Rationalizations, part 3 of the Designing Ethical Experiences series, just went live at UXMatters.

Here’s the teaser:

From “The Big Chill”

Michael: “I don’t know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations.”

“They’re more important than sex.”

Sam: “Ah, come on. Nothing’s more important than sex.”

Michael: “Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?”

Designers rationalize their choices just as much as everyone else. But we also play a unique role in shaping the human world by creating the expressive and functional tools many people use in their daily lives. Our decisions about what is and is not ethical directly impact the lives of a tremendous number of people we will never know. Better understanding of the choices we make as designers can help us create more ethical user experiences for ourselves and for everyone.

Understanding Juicy Rationalizations is the first of a pair of articles focused on the ways that individual designers make ethical choices, and how we can improve our choices. This second pair of articles is a bit of eye-opening window into how people make many of the choices in our daily lives – not just design decisions. Or, at least it was for me… Readers will see connections much broader than simply choices we explicitly think of as ‘ethical’ and / or design related.

The final installment in the Designing Ethical Experiences series is titled “Managing the Imp of the Perverse” – watch for it sometime soon.

With the publication of these next two articles, the Designing Ethical Experiences series consists of two sets of matched pairs of articles; the first article in each pair framing a problematic real-life situation designers will face, and the second suggesting some ways to resolve these challenges ethically.

The first pair of articles – Social Media and the Conflicted Future and Some Practical Suggestions for Designing Ethical Experiences – looked at broad cultural and technology trends like social media and DIY / co-creation, suggesting ways to discover and manage likely ethical conflicts within the design process.

It’s a nice symmetrical structure, if you dig that sort of thing.  (And what architect doesn’t?)

For commuters / multi-taskers / people who prefer listening to reading, Jeff Parks interviewed me on the contents of this second set of articles, which he will publish shortly as a podcast.

Thanks again to the editorial team at UXMatters for supporting my exploration of this very important topic for the future of experience design. In an age when everyone can leverage professional-grade advertising the likes of Spotunner, the ethicality of the expressive tools and frameworks designers create is a question of critical significance for us all.

The I.A. Podcast (by Jeff Parks of I.A. Consultants and BoxesandArrows podcast fame) just published the first of two interviews we recorded recently, talking about ethics, design, social media, and conflict.

Play and download the interview here.

Subscribe to the iTunes and feedburner feeds for the I.A. Podcast here.

Stay tuned for the second interview!

Thanks Jeff!

‘Companies spend huge amounts of money to be ‘socially responsible.’ Do consumers reward them for it? And how much?’ is the leader for a short piece titled Does Being Ethical Pay? just published in Sloan Management Review. The quick answer is “Yes”, so it’s worth reading further to learn the specific ways that ethicality plays into people’s spending decisions.

Here’s an excerpt:

In all of our tests, consumers were willing to pay a slight premium for the ethically made goods. But they went much further in the other direction: They would buy unethically made products only at a steep discount.

What’s more, consumer attitudes played a big part in shaping those results. People with high standards for corporate behavior rewarded the ethical companies with bigger premiums and punished the unethical ones with bigger discounts.

At least according to this research, being ethical is a necessary attribute for a product.

There are clear implications for product design: ethics should be on the table as a concern at all stages of product development, from ideation and concepting of new products, to the marketing and sales of finished products.

And these (limited, certainly not the final word) findings match with the idea of adding ethics to the set of important user experience qualities captured in Peter Morville’s UX Honeycomb.

The (Augmented) Ethical UX Honeycomb

How are user experience designers taking the ethical qualities of their work into account?

Related posts:

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.

Video of my BlogTalk presentation ‘What happens when everyone designs social media? Practical suggestions for handling new ethical dilemmas’ is available from Ustream.tv. The resolution is low (it was shot with a webcam) but the audio is good: follow along with the slides on your own for the full experience.

More videos of BlogTalk sessions here.

Thanks to Facebook’s public mistakes and apology to those affected by Beacon , as well as a number of other ham-handed attempts to monetize the social graph, the intersection of ethics, design, and social networks is receiving overdue attention. Two talks at this year’s Information Architecture Summit in Miami will look at ethics as it applies to the daily work of creating social networks, and user experiences in general.

First is Designing for the social: Avoiding anti-social networks, by Miles Rochford, description below.

This presentation considers the role of traditional social networks and the role of IAs in addressing the challenges that arise when designing and using online social networks.

The presentation discusses philosophical approaches to sharing the self, how this relates to offline social networks and human interactions in different contexts, and provides guidance on how online social networking tools can be designed to support these relationships.

It also covers ethical issues, including privacy, and how these can conflict with business needs. A range of examples illustrate the impact of these drivers and how design decisions can lead to the creation of anti-social networks.

Related: the social networks anti-patterns list from the microformats.org wiki.

The second is The impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design – experiences from the Norwegian woods, by Karl Yohan Saeth and Ingrid Tofte, described as follows:

This presentation discusses ethics in IA from a practical point of view. Through different case studies we illustrate the impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design, and sum up our experiences on dealing with ethics in real projects.

If you’re interested in ethics and the practicalities of user experience (and who isn’t?), both sessions look good. I’ll be talking about other things at the summit this year. In the meantime, stay tuned for the second article in my UXMatters series on designing ethical experiences, due for publication very soon.

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.

UXMatters just published part 1 of a two part series I’m writing on ethics and design titled, Designing Ethical Experiences: Social Media and the Conflicted Future.

Here’s an excerpt, to whet your appetites for a practical take on what’s often seen as a philosophical subject.

Questions of ethics and conflict can seem far removed from the daily work of user experience (UX) designers who are trying to develop insight into people’s needs, understand their outlooks, and design with empathy for their concerns. In fact, the converse is true: When conflicts between businesses and customers–or any groups of stakeholders–remain unresolved, UX practitioners frequently find themselves facing ethical dilemmas, searching for design compromises that satisfy competing camps. This dynamic is the essential pattern by which conflicts in goals and perspectives become ethical concerns for UX designers. Unchecked, it can lead to the creation of unethical experiences that are hostile to users–the very people most designers work hard to benefit–and damaging to the reputations and brand identities of the businesses responsible.

Stay tuned for part two, which will share a set of suggestions for how design can manage conflict and work toward the creation of ethical integrated experiences. Meanwhile, let us know what you think of the ideas here, or at the UXMatters site.