What I don't think of as ethical design

I have a session coming up at the IA Summit in Las Vegas, on Information architecture and ethical design. Googling for ethical design has probably been the least fruitful path for my research, which surprised me.

Not because there's nothing out there on ethical design, but because most of it isn't really what I consider ethical design, at least not in the sense I'm looking for. Most ethical design seems to be preoccupied with designing for good causes. Such as a design firm that specializes in working for non-profits, or one that encourages it's clients to behave (or at least give the appearance of behaving) in more ethical ways. This could take the form of emphasizing sustainability, or being more transparent about a company's inner decision making process and values. It gives the designers and their clients the sense that they are in some way making the world a better place.

Which is all well and good, but it's not what I'm after.

Rather than designing for good causes, I am interested in design encouraging good behaviour. Finding ways to promote and reward good behaviour, to make the path of least resistance an ethical one. As more and more of our activities and interaction occur mediated by technology, the choices this technology give us are not morally neutral. For example, a new feature on a social networking site may incite bullying or aggression, or it may encourage trust and deeper connections between users. These have real effects on wellbeing, self esteem, and so on. They have ethical consequences. And our lives are increasingly being lived in these technologically-mediated ways, increasing these effects. I must admit it terrifies me how few tools we have at our disposal that enable us to look with any real rigour at the ethical consequences of our design decisions. We're practicing this kind of ethical design ineffectively not, I suspect, because we don't want to be doing it right, but because we don't really know how to.

I'm curious if we can link ethical philosophy, and our growing understanding of the nature of human happiness, to the methods we use to design technology. Can we gain enough clarity about what really does make people happier, more fulfilled, more healthy and more aware, that we can directly and clearly apply these as design practices and rules in our daily work? I believe we can.

Perhaps this is only faux ethics? Perhaps we ought to suffer in some way in order to do good? After all, it could be argued that making being ethical easy is in a sense making being ethical more appealing to our own selfishness. That I only did the right thing because it was the best for me.

Humanity does rather badly when coddled into a soft and forgiving state of soporific happiness. Arthur Miller stated this well in the fantastic documentary, the Century of the Self:

"My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness. When in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know, have come out of people’s suffering. The problem is not to undo suffering, or to wipe it off the face of the earth, but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to “cure” ourselves of it constantly, and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call “happiness".

This suggests that we have to take a much more nuanced view on what constitutes ethical design: that designing stuff that just makes people happy is misguided. That happiness alone is a very poor metric for moral worth. Fortunately this has been well understood in moral philosophy since consequentialism and utilitarianism have been thoroughly picked apart. It says something about the embryonic state of ethical design that this nineteenth-century notion of morality is as far as we seem to have gotten. Now is the time to bring things stumbling into the 21th century I think.