Ethical solutions — which team owns the responsibility? Is it Design?

The debate of ethics around design has been around for decades. A good designer is expected to create solutions which are ethically sound. As much as we talk about design ethics in journals and conferences, it is too oblivious to assume that implementing ethical responsibility in one particular team like designers will solve the problem. A single point of view will only make the role constrained. It should be a joined effort to make sure that different teams from different disciplines owns responsibility to provide a more diverse approach to enforce ethical codes.

There is no single correct answer when it comes to ethics. Ethics is a very broad topic and oftentimes is pursued differently among different cultures. Different philosophy branches uses different methodologies and take different values as top priorities: “While deontologists focus on duty, and utilitarians look only at consequences, virtue ethicists are more concerned by the overall moral character” When a diversity of different values are introduced in during ethical evaluation, the outcome will be more adapt to a broader cultural environment.

Also, there’s little practice into designer’s daily consideration when it comes to ethics. As it is, it will be really hard to establish a common moral guidelines for all designers. Paul Nini admitted that the greatest failure lies because designers do not usually daily put ethics consideration as a daily practice: “Many of us are quite familiar with the concepts of “audience-centered” or “user-centered” design, but how many of us can honestly claim to routinely include users or audience members in our process of design?” Therefore, ethical practice should really be a common effort among different departments rather than just designers imagining what ethical designs should look like.

Some would argue that it is also important to understand that despite having a participatory initiative, it boils down to who has to make the final call. Indeed, it is important to understand that different social arrangement for decision making process embodies different ethical considerations and implications. Somehow if we leave ethics rules to the hands of stakeholders, marketing performances and profits, ethical considerations never wins. Our society is based on capitalism and materialization. According to Peter-Paul Verbeek, When technologies coshape human actions, they give material answers to the ethical question of how to act. This implies that engineers are doing “ethics by other means”: they materialize morality.

Without clear conscious choices during the development process across the team, even the best intentions will turn into nothing more than a money making machine.

One good example would be Airbnb. While propositioning its value as Affordable housing, the product offering do not carry this consideration. According to Kyle Barron, Edward Kung, and Davide Prosperpio, Airbnb actually makes the rent in the area higher rather than more affordable.

Using a dataset of Airbnb listings from the entire United States and an instrumental variables estimation strategy, we find that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.018% increase in rents and a 0.026% increase in house prices at the median owner-occupancy rate zip code.

To conclude, successful implementation of ethics, whether it is related to products or services, cannot be one teams responsibility to address. It needs to be a joint effort for it to be truly impactful, just like how it is for innovation. In order to make a product successful, the organisation brings together Design, Technology and business for the aspects of Desirability, feasibility and viability respectively. Similarly, to tackle ethical challenges, all different teams, workers and stakeholders have to come together to paint a complete canvas.