More times than not, the goal of hiring design and marketing professionals is one that is straightforward. After all, despite whether or not creative professionals are needed for branding work, content production, UI/UX, or sales writing, the goals of the people that hire them are relatively clear—to help their business, in some way or another, make more money. But for as much as both marketing and design professionals help businesses make more money, the people who operate in these professional roles long enough also develop a concept of how these spaces should—and should not—operate. Over time, these concepts have been shared everywhere—from personal blogs, to corporate websites, to Medium posts—and evolved into a doctrine predicated on creative professionals having a concept of ethics while committing themselves to professional work. Overall, I have been supportive of these discussions—particularly as the last half-decade of adverse effects have forced professionals to re-examine how products are made, designed, and sold to the general public. Considerably, many of these lines of conversation tend to dovetail at one point in particular: the idea of ownership, or accountability, for the effects of adverse design and marketing practice. But a recent conversation I had with an “average user” over the weekend left me briefly considering if the concept of accountability as we like to think of it, is really little more than a car driving by at 60 mph, while we are little more than the dogs trying to catch it. So the question becomes, if accountability in design is a paradox, where do designers draw the line for what they will and will not be accountable for? It took me a conversation about app design with a line cook to consider this, and I wanted to share my thoughts with you.
Usually, when I go out on the town for some social time and casual drinks, I have the tendency to stick to my very particular crowd of friends in the local punk rock community. Generally, they are pretty easygoing working-class folks who I spent some time coming up with when I had to work in the local service industry to make ends meet—back in my vaunted days as a
“poor” creative. And because we have known each other for so long, we rarely ask about work—largely because everybody knows what each other does. Some people are bartenders, others are plumbers, electricians, and carpenters. Most people have their own businesses, and make good money working for themselves… and like the plumbers, carpenters, and electricians, I have always been known as the “resident designer.”
And why would I not be? I was designing when I first met them, making covers for bands that their friends were in, and I do it now—well, not the cover art. But from where they sit, regardless of if I change industries or disciplines, what I do doesn’t count to them as “new shit.”
I don’t take offense to it, and the way I see it, sometimes that’s just shit being “the way that it is,” but sometimes while living a routine life, it can be easily forgotten that what we do and who we are can be interesting to someone else. In my case, this stranger was a person that I met through an old friend at the bar.
“Hey, I’m Meatball, what’s your name?” He reaches out, and while shaking his hand I introduce myself.
“Cliff. Nice to meet you.”
“Aren’t you a cook?”
“I was, but a very long time ago,” I respond.
“So what do you do now?”
“I do content production and UI/UX design. Currently, most of my work is in UI/UX.”
“So what is UI/UX?” he asked.
It was at this point that I briefly took the time to describe the objectives of the field and the nature of the work. That “UX is a human-centric design approach that takes into consideration how people use things so as to maximize the utility, accessibility, and the efficiency of a product,” and that “UI is a field tasked with taking these considerations and manifesting them in the form of realized design decisions that contribute to the development of an interactive, user-facing experience.” Put another way: while UI may determine how a user interface looks, UX determines how that interface should feel and be organized for maximum effect.
“It kind of reminds me of how gas stations are organized when you have the candy bars next to the cash register,” Meatball responds. “You go in wanting a Gatorade, and you come out with the Gatorade plus a pack of Skittles.”
“Yeah, you could say that it is almost exactly like that, but with applications instead of gas stations—and instead of selling candy bars, you are selling screen time and user engagement… But proverbially speaking, it is essentially the same shit.”
It was at this point that Meatball proceeded to ask the question that many who find out I am a designer—and doing well for myself—naturally feel the impulse to posit: So, is it easy? To this, my answer is always mixed—a yes and no, if you will—and you could say that this case was no different. I told him that while learning the tools of design is easy, there absolutely are times when being a professional designer is hard. When you are seasoned enough in the tools of the trade, the challenge of design does not emanate from the technical skill curve required to actuate the product. Instead, the true challenges of design stem from balancing the priorities surrounding how products should interact with the user: that things should not only be structurally sound, or functional, or pretty—but that they should also be ethical too.
“I don’t understand why you would have to take into consideration ethics when making designs. I mean, why would professionals ever treat it as their responsibility to manage the effects of say, something like social media, and what people do on there, how they feel, or how they act as a result?”
Arguably, this was the most interesting question directed at me all night—and not just because I have been spending my most recent time designing apps. It was interesting for fact that I have spent a much, much, longer stretch of time running digital advertising campaigns and designing content—so the question of ethics is a strong point of convergence between the fields of UI/UX, and Content Marketing. Namely, Meatball’s question dared to ask where the agency of professionals in these spaces begins and ends.
I also found the question interesting for another reason: That despite how much concern professionals in both marketing and design may have for the general public, how they are reached, and the immeasurable cost of winning their attention—the general public has grown accustomed to not having any concern for itself. In so many ways, the difference between perceiving design work as “easy money at home” versus a “real job with real, and nuanced challenges” is understanding that these responsibilities arise—and a strong argument could be made for meatball’s question serving as proof enough for the why the professional designer necessitates themselves to exist in the first place.
But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point. In our time speaking with one another, Meatball shared his opinion that despite what accountability the designer may claim, there will always be a point where the designer has to consider that his or her creation is intended for a sovereign individual. In our conversation, Meatball shared the opinion that maybe over-designing a product would be creating something that did not treat the user’s own decision making with some degree of respect—and that at some point or another, regardless of what ills designers and marketers may claim, the user will still have to account for their own actions.
And if we were to run with this line of thinking, there is absolutely a degree of credence to these claims. If you are hell-bent on out-engineering every single potentiality for societal ill to be expressed within your product, by the end of the day you might not even really have a product to begin with—just a system. While I do not agree with how companies such as Facebook manage their systems, I do understand the complexity of the ethos behind Facebook’s treatment of its systems: That the internet should be a place of free expression, and that the subsequent over-moderation, regulation, and social engineering of its systems could run the threat of making the internet something that it was not intended to be in the first place. This also means that having to reconcile this philosophy with UX features that keep people safe can be a steep challenge for even corporations with Facebook’s level of resources. For instance, if seeing fancy cars and vacations on services such as Facebook and Instagram make users depressed, while each of these companies could incorporate features that would reduce the propensity of some of these images passing a user’s screen, they do not necessarily have the power to stop people from posting beautiful cars, clothes, homes, and vacations. And if they thought they did, what would their excuse be? “Sorry, you are too rich to be sharing content on our platform?” ‘ The fuck outta here with that line of thinking—it just doesn’t make sense.
And this leads to another, lesser-seen, aspect to Meatball’s argument as well: that in fact, the idea of ethical accountability in design and marketing—while nice—may be paradoxical by its very existence. For instance, even if professionals managed to be accountable for every social ill that is expressed within their products, it would still be very difficult—if not impossible—to account for the entire scope of motivations for why users use certain things in a certain way. For instance, while companies such as Square Cash are best used for throwing friends and family members a few extra bucks, pooling rent, or splitting bills, there are plenty of people who use Square Cash to accept credit card payments for illegal drug deals, prostitution, and laundering small amounts of money. Keep in mind, that as a payment processor, Square Cash is legally obligated to report these things—and its compliance team does the best that it can—but with nobody being forced to add notes to their payments, there is no way to fully know what people are sending and receiving money for. So let me posit the question: can a UX designer ethically design a product such as, say, Square Cash, to minimize the effects of it being used for prostitution? Perhaps, but the idea that design can completely eradicate the incentive for prostitutes to use Square Cash—by even so much as half of what it is now—is fallacious on its face, and easily provable within how people use these systems right now, and how the people that run these systems cannot seem to stop them.
I think the flaw in his logic, however, is as simple as this: if you know what you are doing, and you know what the effects are, and you still choose to do it anyway, then the blame is on you. Professionals take responsibility because professionals know what they are doing. The reality of the situation is that while professional accountability may very well be a paradox in product design, professionals understand that the marketplace benefits when they hold themselves accountable. Considerably, the reason why arguing in favor of “human will,” “individual agency,” and “adult decision making” is not a sufficient professional approach is because enough thought on these subjects will present the reality that people make decisions out of ignorance every day. Put another way, many people don’t know any better. This is to say that those who are in a position of expertise are ethically responsible for not taking advantage of that ignorance to cause harm. To do the opposite would be the professional equivalent of creating a room, filling it with spikes, inviting people inside, and then blaming them for getting killed.
And while that is a morbid-yet-true comparison to what not being held accountable may be akin to, it does little to speak for the proverbial “line” that designers and marketers have to draw when determining what is and is not an ethical creation for the masses. While me and meatball’s conversation was ultimately interrupted by our mutual friends—so I could never provide him with the complete answer—I think many designers would agree that accountability begins at the experience itself. If you are an app designer, then it starts at the login screen. If you are a copywriter, it starts at the first sentence. If you are a content producer, it starts at the first frame. But at the same time, accountability ends at our own professional limitations. What I mean by this is that there are certain things that certain roles simply are not destined to do—or have any control over—in the customer experience. Marketers are not app designers. App designers are not content moderators, and for fucks sake, content moderators are not therapists. This is also to say that for as much as creating ethical work is a team effort, sometimes if that work requires the user input to be fully realized, certain aspects of the work product can only be handled by entities far outside of the team of creators. The sooner we accept that, the easier it will be to do our individual parts in not only creating ethical work, but properly accounting for the things that we create.
No Comments