Event 2: PSYKHE

Introduction

I attended a talk on ethical design held by PSYKHE and I must say that I am amazed by what was discussed. PSYKHE is a UX design company and though they are only 5 years old, they have a rather big clientele of prominent local businesses like CapitaLand and DBS etcetera. The founder of PSYKHE, Hema, shared with us the team's vision on ethical design, their definition and their plan to make it an applicable heuristic that designers can use to determine if their brand/organisation is ethical. 

Design is not neutral

While I have always understood the need for design to be ethical, I was under the impression that ethics primarily belonged in the design process of user research - collecting data with the participant's awareness and acknowledgement that the data will be used for purposes revealed to the participant. Hema shared with us a statement that completely overthrew my assumption: design is not neutral. She cited the example of the design of a gun. Without a gun, one would view others as human beings, people to have conversations with. However, once a gun is in someone's hands, they suddenly view others as a target with two choices: to shoot or not to shoot. This really puts into perspective that the responsibility lies on the designer - how would we design for good intent? This becomes extremely hard when we consider that intent is ambiguous and that designs can be misappropriated by users. Hema addresses this point as she promotes designing with good intent while also being responsible for mitigating any ill-intent brought about by the design when users interact with it. I would understand this as restraining what the users can do with the design so that they can only follow the flow that my good intent design has laid out. However, this is very much contradictory to what we were taught. Considering the context, we should give users the accessibility to manipulate the design so that they may get to their goal. Now, designing just got a whole lot more complicated. There is a need to be more conscious of any potential points of abuse in the design. While a design may not be ill-intent proof, I also agree on taking responsibility for any misuse of the system. I wonder if I would be able to stick to these words should the time arise...

What is Ethical Design?

Figure 1

Appearing like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, PSYKHE has iterated a hierarchy ranking the importance of what makes up ethical design: safety, privacy, transparency, inclusivity, environmental responsibility, and altruism. 

Definitions

• Safety: developing products that do not endanger the physical and mental safety of users and society and being responsible for mitigating negative consequences. 
• Privacy: respecting users' right to personal information and space, protecting it from unauthorised access, use or abuse. 
• Transparency: being open, honest and clear about the design, functionality, process and consequences of products, services and spaces. 
• Inclusivity: ensuring the design is accessible and usable across a wide variety of needs and abilities. 
• Environmentally responsible: creating products, services and spaces that have a minimal negative impact on the earth, throughout their lifecycles. 
• Altruism: actively designing for positive impact and contributing towards reducing inequalities.

Inclusivity

I was very interested in why exactly inclusivity was included in their hierarchy of ethical design. The example Hema provided here was particularly memorable. She talks about automotive design, and the circulation of crash test dummies since the 1970s that have been modelled on the average male build. She raises issues on not accounting for the average female, elderly or children sitting in the front seats of a car. She provided statistics on the consequences of this exclusivity which resulted in females disproportionally higher of getting injured: 3x more whiplash; 17% more likely to be killed than a man; and 73% more likely to suffer serious injuries in a frontal car crash. The first female crash test dummy was only designed in 2022. This really puts into perspective why inclusivity is a part of ethical design. In our user research, we like to refer to our target audience as a typical user, an average user, sometimes occasionally happening upon edge cases. These terms blind us to our own biases on what constitutes an average user or an abnormality, ultimately affecting the design. We even apply this in our design processes of personas and scenarios which illustrate a fictional user and their interactions. This fictional user then becomes our average user, guiding our design work. 

However, I believe that it was not PSYKHE's mind to believe that we can design for each user... That would simply be too optimistic and unrealistic. I still believe that personas and scenarios, though describing an average user, are especially important in design processes. I experienced this again first-hand in our group project. Though they describe an average user, it allows designers to focus efforts on designing for interactions that users are most likely to do. If we had to design for each and every user, it would be endless... It might even be impossible for the design to make it to the market. 

Conclusion

Overall, this talk has reiterated to me the importance of being conscious of context and understanding that in terms of feasibility and limitations, it would be best to allow users (to a certain degree) to cater the design to better fit themselves. I also find it extremely inspiring that PSYKHE is putting in efforts to conduct research in making an applicable hierarchy of ethical design that we designers can use as heuristics. This is a very big step forward, especially if it is taught to us in school. Ethical design is applied to every stage of the design process - more than just limiting ethics to user research, the importance of the components that constitute ethical design has varying degrees based on the stage of the design process. 

Reflecting on how I could apply ethical design in the group project, there could have been room for improvement in considering toolbar customisation. This would cater to inclusivity as users are now able to easily access tools and even arrange them in ways that make tools easier to tap on given certain contexts. For example, placing the bold button on the side of their typing hand so that they can easily bold text when typing with one hand.