IA summit: Information architecture and ethical design

I’m speaking at the IA summit in Las Vegas on the 24th of March on ethical design and its applicability to information architecture.

Here is the the presentation description:

We live the experience economy. Long ago we met our basic needs: food, clothing, housing, transport and so on. What companies sell now is ‘experiences’, experiences carefully designed to evoke specific emotions. The modern meaning of the word brand is ‘the emotional reaction a person has towards a company or product”. Think of what Nike means to you, or Coca Cola, or BMW, or Apple or Microsoft. You have a feeling about each of those companies. And those companies are all working overtime on trying to get you to feel a certain way about them. They have designs on your emotions.

It’s this emotional reaction that we are paying extra money for. Maybe it’s the feeling of being good citizens and healthy by buying organic or fair trade goods, or maybe its the feeling of being successful and higher status by buying Prada. Either way, a very significant part of the value of the product to us is the feeling it gives us to buy / own / consume it.

But it’s all going a bit wrong. The more exposure we get to marketing and branding designed to trigger our emotions, the more desensitized we get to these influences. So companies ratchet up the emotion further, trying to get the same level of reaction. How does your product cut through the noise? By being louder… but if you get too loud, then people go deaf. And they are. We are. We are becoming desensitised.

The aspirations we have are increasingly defined by the media, which is the primary channel companies have for pushing their brands. Create ‘aspirational brands’ that tell us how we should live our lives, then offer products that will ‘help’ us get there. Create a new need, thenfulfil it. The aim is to make us discontent with our current lives and experiences, so we want to spend money on enhanced experiences, and feel better.

These patterns are being amplified and accelerated as more of our interaction becomes mediated by the net: shopping, socialising, entertainment, education, communication. Unbranded space is diminishing; increasingly our lives are becoming commercialised, quantified, data-mined and ad-revenue aligned.

Perhaps there is a better way?

This presentation will look at how as information architects we can approach our work in this cultural context. How we might take an informed, ethical stand. It will cover some of the prominent contemporary theories of ethical design, culture / media studies, and behavioural psychology, and look at their applicability to information architecture. It will explore areas such as brand authenticity, privacy, social networking, push versus pull marketing, and ubiquitous computing. And it will provide concrete examples and methods for how these can be used in practice. The aim is to bring abstract ethical theory down to the level of the concrete and applicable, and perhaps inspire some to add ‘Help make the World a better place’ to every list of requirements.

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