Technologists are rightly starting to question their influence on a world spiralling off its expected course, and as the industry matures, it’s natural to pay attention to deeper questions of impact and justice. As sociologist Richard Sennett points out, ‘It is at the level of mastery […] that ethical problems of craft appear.’ — 12: 114-116
academics complain about practitioners’ hubristic ability to run repeatedly into the same old walls, while being paid handsomely to do so. — 17: 178-179
Resolving externalities means we first have to recognise them, but often they lie in the shadows, falling on ignored minorities or existing only in a hazy future. — 21: 232-233
Bias is an umbrella term for several types of imbalance: are we talking about sampling bias, innate structural bias, or explicit prejudice? — 28: 335-336
Some academics choose to explicitly list their potential biases – a process known as bracketing – before starting a piece of research, and take note whenever they sense bias could be influencing their work. — 31: 384-385
Every business textbook offers a step-by-step guide to stakeholder analysis, but most only cover teammates or suspiciously homogenous groups like ‘users’ or ‘residents’. This perspective, reinforced by the individualist focus of user-centred design, means we often overlook important groups. Stakeholders aren’t just the people who can affect a project; they’re also the people the project might affect. To force ourselves to consider the right people, try using a prompt list (see appendix) to capture a wider range of potential stakeholders, and use this as an input to futuring exercises and the design process. Not all stakeholders will be welcome. In some cases, it might be worth including, say, a criminal, terrorist, or troll as a negative stakeholder – a persona non grata25 – so the team can discuss how to actively reduce the harm this person can do. He may even deserve full persona treatment, with a name, an abusive scenario, and listed motivations to increase his profile within the team. Stakeholders could even include social concepts: things we value in society but rarely consider within our influence, such as democracy, justice, or freedom of the press. As we now know, technology has the power to damage these ideas; explicitly listing them as stakeholders, or at least acknowledging their potential vulnerability, might help us protect them. — 40: 512-522
helping people ascend the face of Mt. Maslow and reach an enlightened summit. — 49: 632-632
the average American spends 3.1 hours on a mobile device each day, compared to just eighteen minutes in 2008, with no corresponding drop in desktop use. — 51: 659-660
Social design researcher Nynke Tromp suggests we classify persuasion by strength and visibility, creating four types of influence: decisive, coercive, persuasive, and seductive. — 62: 831-832
Kant also posed another useful deontological question: am I treating people as ends or means?27 This deserves some explanation. For our purposes, the question asks whether we’re using people – users, stakeholders, wider society – for our own success, or treating them as autonomous individuals with their own goals. Designers usually don’t struggle with the ends-or-means question, since they tend to believe deeply in the importance of users’ goals. The question tends to be more difficult when we ask it about company-wide decisions, particularly those that affect millions of people. — 65: 873-877
The Time Well Spent movement29 asks how tech would look if it were designed to respect human values rather than capture attention. The movement taps into theories of calm technology and mindfulness to inspire designers to protect users’ time and agency, and argues for new business models that subvert the attention economy. — 70: 948-951
the most important parts of ethics: dialogue, consensus, resolve. — 90: 1227-1227
Until recently, we assumed that for machines to understand the physical world, the world would have to volunteer its information. We’d need both human mapmakers – information architects and other masters of taxonomy and labelling – and a range of self-describing, self-reporting objects (‘spimes’) that continually broadcast their status. That no longer seems necessary. — 108: 1483-1486