Children of men

Just watched Children of Men. What a great film.
It presents a dystopian near-future world where the human race has lost its fertility. The lack of children (the youngest person alive is 18) has driven us to the verge of total social breakdown. The references are great: sneaking-in Aphex Twin, Banksy, and more, amplifying current trends in UK culture to show them for what they are. In particular, the filmmakers manage to present the subjective experience of being a militarily-suppressed culture vividly and powerfully. Whilst this is never made explicit, it is clearly a comment on the Iraq war and makes its points with the force of a sledgehammer.

What sci-fi should be about, imho.

Clive Owen seems to be picking the right scripts. This, plus Inside Man, are probably my two favourite films of the last 6 months.

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, then fulfil 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.

A new shopping concept for men

It finally dawned on my why men hate shopping so much. It's because the user experience of shopping has been designed around female preferences. How? Well...


We have descended from hunter gatherer societies. The men doing the hunting and the women doing the gathering. The modern retail experience is based on the gathering model: the female model. Wander around, pick up, sniff, put down, forage some more, pick up, place in basket, and so on. No wonder women like to shop and men, well, don't. It taps into their evolutionary and cultural roots.

So what we need is a new retail experience: one that works for men. And it should go something like this:

A man walks into a store, goes up to the counter and says 'I need a blue t-shirt'. The blue shirt (doesn't matter which, men don't care) is attached to the back of a small but swift animal which is promptly released into the long grass. The man chases the animal (spear provided) and having successfully skewered the creature, removes his selection and takes it over to the counter to pay for it.

I guarantee men will enjoy shopping like this vastly more than a trip round a department store.

Paris Hilton news ban by AP

In case you missed it, Associated Press recently carried out a one week total ban on reporting on Paris Hilton...
The sky is falling! But seriously, the modern form of our cult of celebrity is surely doing no one any favours. What I want to know is why, despite my deep dislike of Ms Hilton, I get that peculiar voyeuristic sense of desire meets disgust when I read about her on perez hilton. And why should I care about Britney's various hair removal schemes? Why oh why oh why? Time to tear my own eyes out. But I do care, like the rest of us, and I so wish I didn't care (I suspect also like the rest of us).

I get exactly the same feeling when I see roadkill, for what it's worth.

I don't fault journalists for reporting this stuff. After all, we all want to read it. The trick is somehow to figure out why we want to read it in the first place, and find a way to substitute this for something higher in vitamins and minerals. I'd love to see a neuro-imaging map of someones brain as they watched celebrities.

Read about it on CNN.

On Adam Greenfield's Ethical Guidelines

Adam Greenfield writes eloquently on the site boxes and arrows on ethical design and ubiquitous computing. His article All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings, sets out a series of five principles that designers can follow in order to design ethically. These are:

1. Default to harmlessness (user safety comes first)
2. Be self-disclosing (always disclose all features)
3. Be conservative of face (do not embarrass, humiliate or shame users)
4. Be conservative of time (don't waste someones time)
5. Be deniable (opt out at any point)

This is a good list. I doubt anyone would deny it's utility. They remind me a little of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction allow a human being to come to harm
2. A robot must obey orders givin it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

These were an attempt to create some basic principles for artificial intelligence programming that would ensure 'robots' would do no wrong, namely be moral. And it is not unremarkable that we see the convergence of user interface design and artificial intelligence design principles. The smarter our machines get the more they will have to act like moral agents.

But I don't think Greenfield goes far enough. Like most contemporary discussions on ethics in HCI, the preoccupation seems to be with ease of use and giving the user a good user experience. To quote from his article:

"Imagine the feeling of being stuck in voice-mail limbo, or fighting unwanted auto-formatting in a word processing program, or trying to quickly silence an unexpectedly ringing phone by touch, amid the hissing of fellow moviegoers—except all the time, and everywhere, and in the most intimate circumstances of our lives. Levels of discomfort we accept as routine (even, despite everything we know, inevitable!) in the reasonably delimited scenarios presented by our other artifacts will have redoubled impact in a ubicomp world."

Certainly this matters. Frustration, design-induced user error, accidental information disclosure, the reduction in privacy; all of these are important. But they are based on too narrow a view. They don't take into account the longer term. The model being used is a direct user to machine interaction, and the immediate (or imminent) emotions that a user experiences. Shame, frustration, and so on. What is not accounted for is the longer term effect of technology on cultural norms, on collective behaviour, on society. Otherwise known as morality.

Our tools effect us not only in the moment, over time our tools reshape our culture. And in turn our culture reshapes us. As designers of tools, we have a moral duty to not only build tools that have good usability (as per Greenfield's principles), but must also consider how the use of those tools will in turn change the users.

We accept the statement we are what we eat without much resistance. I would add to this: we become what we use. Or, in the words of Marshall McLuhan "We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us".

Consider television. Taking the conventional HCI ethical design approach we might devise some principles like:

1. Ensure the remote control is easy to use, including for the old and disabled
2. Ensure parental controls can prevent children seeing inappropriate content
3. Ensure that any information being gathered via the TV (eg viewing habits) is made clear to the viewers, and has their consent
4. Don't force viewers to watch what they don't want to watch (the great flaw in TV imho)

These are fine, but not enough. They fail to address the effect that TV has on those who watch it. How, for instance, family life has changed as the TV has become the focal point in the living room and has taken on the role of the conversationalist, the teacher, the role model and the window onto the world. A society with televisions in it is radically different from one without, irrespective of what is being broadcast, or what the user interface of the televisions is like. As Marshall McLuhan put it in 1964 in Understanding Media:

"The young people who have experienced a decade of TV have naturally imbibed an urge toward involvement in depth that makes all the remote visualized goals of usual culture seem not only unreal but irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anemic. It is the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV's mosaic image. This change of attitude has nothing to do with programming in any way, and would be the same if the programs consisted entirely of the highest cultural content. The change in attitude by means of relating themselves to the mosaic TV image would occur in any event. It is, of course, our job not only to understand this change but to exploit it for its pedagogical richness. The TV child expects involvement and doesn't want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society. Unbridled and misunderstood, this richly human need can manifest itself in the distorted forms displayed in West Side Story. The TV child cannot see ahead because he wants involvement, and he cannot accept a fragmentary and merely visualized goal or destiny in learning or in life".

He has paints an overly positive picture of the notion of involvement provoked by TV I feel, but he does colourfully describe the more profound effects of a medium on its users. In particularly, through his concept the medium is the message, he shows us that the true effect (including moral effect) of a new medium should not be understood in terms of the content its delivers, or its usability, but rather in terms of how it alters our behaviour, self image and subsequent desires and actions.

Trying to understand how our design decisions may effect the lives of our users and alters their culture is incredibly difficult. In particular, we need to understand why people behave the way they do: the interface between our fixed / universal behaviour (our nature) and our culture (our nurture). What can we legitimately seek to change, and what must we take as fixed? We need to understand how group dynamics work, so that we can understand how our tools may change them. Why are we good to each other, and what encourages / discourages us to be so? And we need to understand how our own individual moral sense is formed, shaped and expressed within continuously changing culture. Why do I make the choices that I do, and how do the tools and media that I surround myself with influence those choices? And finally, how does the feedback from this in turn influence and change me?

Ethics for the New Millenium

I'm reading Ethics for the New Millenium, by the Dalai Lama. I was wondering how relevant his commentary might be to design and technology. He gets to it almost straight away, this is from the first chapter:

"The paradox whereby inner - or we could say psychological and emotional - suffering is so often found amid material wealth is readily apparent throughout much of the West. Indeed, it is so pervasive that we might wonder whether there is something in Western culture which predisposes people living there to such kinds of suffering? This i doubt. So many factors are involved. Clearly, material development itself has a role to play. But we can also cite the increasing urbanization of modern society, where high concentrations of people live in close proximity to one another. In this context, consider that in place of our dependence on one another for support, today, wherever possible, we tend to rely on machines and services. Whereas formerly farmers would call in all their family members to help with the harvest, today they simply telephone a contractor. We find modern living organized so that it depends the least possible direct dependence on others. The more or less universal ambition seems to be for everyone to own their own house, their own car, their own computer, and so on in order to be as independent as possible. This is natural and understandable. The increasing autonomy that people enjoy as a result of advances in science and technology has its good points. In fact, it is possible today to be far more independent of others than ever before. But with these developments, there has arisen a sense that my future is not dependent on my neighbour but rather on my job or, at most, my employer. This is turn encourages us to suppose that because others are not important for my happiness, their happiness is not important to me".

I read this as technology having taken us further away from our dependence on each other. Or at least from our awareness of our need for dependence on each other. We have come to rely more on our tools, and less on each other. Whilst this has clear benefits, it has obscured the simple fact that we are deeply reliant on each other, and that our sense of wellbeing and purpose is tied to this reliance. It has skewed our culture more towards (the evolutionary psychology definition of) status seeking behaviour, and away from reciprocal altruism. A culture of me, I, now, and so on. This is important not just because this inter-dependence directly effects our own happiness, but because it is a necessary ingredient of morality. Having these foundations in our lives promotes ethical behaviour. A sense of connectivity and community creates trust and empathy, the ingredients of reciprocal altruism, which in turn (along with kin selection) underpins morality.

What is fascinating to me about social networking is that it is reversing this trend that the Dalai Lama is describing. We are creating technology that is making our connections to and need for communication with others more apparent to us. Where we are able to quantify and value our social network, and place more importance on it than, for example, what car we drive. The Dalai Lama is no doubt right that some of our Western existential anxt is coming from this lack of social interconnectivity. This suggests that building technologies that explicitly emphasize, illustrate, reward and encourage connection could lead to a reversal in this cultural trend. A trend that started pretty much with the industrial revolution, and accelerated dramatically across the 20th century. And a trend that fuels, in my opinion, much of what I'd call unethical behaviour today.

He goes on to say:

"We have, in my view, created a society in which people find it harder and harder to show one another basic affection. In place of the sense of community and belonging, which we find such a reassuring feature of less wealthy (and generally rural) societies, we find a high degree of loneliness and alienation. Despite the fact that millions live in close proximity to one another, it seems that many people, especially among the old, have no one to talk to but their pets. Modern industrial society often strikes me as being like a huge self-propelled machine. Instead of human beings in charge, each individual is a tiny, insignificant component with no choice but to move when the machine moves".

Despite being assailed by a constant stream of advertising and advertorial thinly disguised as content, all telling us to focus on ourselves, our status, appearance and trappings of success, we are still lonely and unhappy. The emotional payoff promised in the sexy tagline turned out to be a lie. And through that loneliness and isolation comes a realization that all of that materialism and retail therapy isn't going to help us. That going out to buy yet another "thing "won't fill the void.

I am optimistic. Business may realize that we are looking for products and services that bring us closer together, not ones that separate us (through appeals to individualism and so on). That it is inherently unsatisfying to only be known by what we achieve and what we own, and that this needs to be balanced by what we do for others, and what communities we belong to. The web has created the possibility to create sustainable businesses that provides a platform for this. Now we just have to do it.

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.

Epexegesis

Epexegesis:
A rhetorical form: to reinterpret what one has just said. Self-interpretation.