Designing the Good Life: The Ethics of User Experience Design

“You cannot not communicate,” psychologist and philosopher Paul Watzlawick once famously said. Similarly, whatever we create as user experience designers influences others - even if we don’t intend it. And as software is eating the world, the domain of our responsibility is rapidly becoming all-encompassing. Layer by layer, question by question, this talk invites you to reflect on the moral dimensions of your work. Talk presented May 29 at UX London 2014.

Published in: Design

Designing the Good Life: The Ethics of User Experience Design from Sebastian Deterding

Transcript

• 1. http://www.flickr.com/photos/vpolat/4987213555 designing the good life the ethics of user experience design Sebastian Deterding (@dingstweets) UX London 2014, May 29, 2014 c b
• 2. <1> the thieves of time So I would like to begin by telling you a story.
• 3. A story taken from a favourite children’s book of mine, actually.
• 4. It takes place in a quiet little town, somewhere in Italy, some time in the 20th century.
• 5. One day, at an amphitheatre, the girl Momo appears, seemingly from nowhere, with no recollection of her past, dressed in an old long coat. The villagers soon discover that Momo has a special gift: Just by truly listening to people, she can help them get happy again, or resolve a conflict, or find a solution.
• 6. The peace of the village is disturbed when the Men In Grey appear. They introduce themselves to the villagers as representatives of Timesavings Bank, Inc.
• 7. To each villager, a man in grey calculates how many seconds they will still have in their live, and how many of those precious seconds they are currently wasting.
• 8. That extended chat with the newspaper man every morning? 3.285 million wasted seconds over the time of your life. That flower you bring to that woman who’s blind and cannot even see it? 15.126 million seconds.
• 9. Appalled, the people promise to immediately start saving time and deposit it with the Timesavings Bank.
• 10. But a curious think happens: The more time people save, the less time they seem to have. Instead, they become ever-more hectic, stressed, rushed, cold, anaemic – as if all life and colour had been sucked out of them.
• 11. In the conceit of the story, it turns out that the Men in Grey are not from a Timesavings Bank, but a supernatural race of parasites that feeds off of human time.
• 12. They store the time people save in a giant underground vault as frozen hour lilies – each petal the physical manifestation of a minute of life.
• 13. The Men in Grey then thaw the petals to roll them into cigars.
• 14. And by smoking them, they ingest human time. Without us saving our time for them, they would perish. I won’t spoil the ending of the story for you. But the phenomenon it picks up is real enough.
• 15. john maynard keynes »Technological unemployment ... means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, ... to live wisely and agreeably and well.« economic possibilities for our grandchildren (1930) http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm Already in the 1930s, economist John Maynard Keynes projected that in our age, technical progress would have compounded to the point that we have solved the problem of scarcity. Instead, we’d be faced with the quintessential human problem how to deal with free time and nothing to do.
• 16. http://www.flickr.com/photos/8344872@N05/5166095952 And yet, to me, – and I would guess for most of you – my work day feels more like this. But why? Why, especially for us digital workers, although we are automating away more and more work and become wealthier and wealthier, why do we feel like we are more and more short on time, overwhelmed, overworked?
• 17. And this is not just a subjective impression. According to several studies, despite growing economic prosperity, life satisfaction has remained stagnant in industrial nations in the past decades. So why?