Who is responsible for the impact of innovative products?

Literally: most physical products are hard or impossible to repair and are discarded really fast. And many popular software UIs range from meh to user-hostile. How can it be that we say we’re doing user-centered design, while much of it is essential to overconsumption and the sorry state (sidenote: Recently, we crossed the sixth of nine planetary boundaries ) our environment and climate is in?

Here’s another attempt at answering the classic design ethics question: who’s responsible?

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Is it you?

I’m not blaming you for this. You probably didn’t have a choice; you were just thrown into late stage capitalism and somehow have to make ends meet. Most designers are just workers, not unlike the office assistants, support agents and store clerks involved in getting products to people. Occasionally the job comes with a little more status and salary. But we’re just as replaceable as everyone else.

If you’re a designer and have power to make high-level business decisions like, are we designing yet another fossil-fuelled car or are we taking mobility and the climate emergency seriously—then you may be a rare case where I’d say you actually have a say in what’s going on.

But if you’re the designer who’s making the rad concept sketches for such a car: you’re just screwed like everyone else.

Constraints make a design

Maybe you’re a digital designer though, a UXer. You’re actually coming up with new ideas— innovative product concepts—and make them a reality.

But remember that you combine three things: usability (or desirability), feasibility and viability. And you don’t get to set the feasibility and viability constraints. If there’s anyone at all (other than the economy), it’s the person you report to. Your work needs to hit certain targets. When you work for a booking website, you have to make sure that whatever thing you make better eventually results in more bookings, bigger orders or both. When you work at the computer company, eventually your work should lead to more product sales, cloud services revenue or both.

Of course, when the design constraints don’t have humanity at heart (the vehicle must burn fossil fuels to move/the bottle must be made out of PET/the website must make the corporation look friendly and green), you can user-center as much as you want, but the outcome is going to be inhumane regardless.

And now I’ve only even considered the constraints for the designs. When product managers or engineers don’t agree with a design, it’s painfully obvious that designers don’t get to decide what design solutions get built.

So, if designers are neither at the start of the innovation process (sidenote: We should be! But if everything would be as it should, this post would be very different. ) , nor at the end of it, it seems unfair to say they’re responsible for the outcomes of that process. To make things muddier, product development isn’t a linear process. A product team or department acts more like a network where everyone influences everyone. And that network extends beyond the organization. Suppliers, customers, investors, media—they can all influence decision-making.

Really? Nobody is responsible for anything?

Of course, when responsibility is shared, everybody can have some.

I like complaining about at greedy entrepreneurs as the cause of unsustainable business. But they, too, could argue that they didn’t invent capitalism—that if we’re to live in a world with commercial companies, somebody has to found these and make sure they’re profitable. That without the profits, they can’t attract investors, can’t hire designers, can’t innovate.

But their overused ‘if we don’t do it, the competitor will’ excuse ignores that likely, that competitor doesn’t want to do bad things either. It also ignores that they can talk to their competitor about it. And that if two important players in a market announce that they won’t do business with big oil, that can both generate good PR and cause others to follow. The competitors that continue to do dirty business, will get pressure from their employees to follow suit. If not directly, they should notice it through resignations.

That’s not wishful thinking. Many companies already have (often) public policies to, for example, not use slave labor in their supply chain, not do business with tobacco companies or not promote alcohol consumption among children.

Developing products is a team effort that, with today’s infinite supply chains, depends on the human collective. So is the destruction of our natural environment, supporting dictatorships through trade and exploiting certain types of people by not giving equal pay. Collective effort leads to collective responsibility.

At the same time, each member of the collective benefits individually through salary, stock options and profit. Everybody in the collective who isn’t forced to work their also has the choice to refuse to participate (and likely has better options to influence the collective’s decision-making than using that as a threat). From that follows, that individuals within the collective also deserve responsibility for the impact of the collective.

Arguably, business owners and managers should take more responsibility than those lower in the hierarchy. They benefit more, with (potentially) higher payments and status. And, as good leaders, they should have more control over the outcomes of the work of the organization.

And often they do take that responsibility! That doesn’t mean workers can hide from responsibility behind the bosses. After all, without workers, bosses wouldn’t get anything done. So designers, in every layer of an organization, have responsibility too.

But all that doesn’t set designers apart from the others yet.

But designers are the users’ advocates!

I can’t ignore one important difference between designers and for instance engineers. Designers are supposed to listen to users a lot, observe them and understand the context in which the products are used. They should be able to tell in advance if a design solution has negative side effects. Because designers are supposed to know their product’s use context, they have a responsibility to share that knowledge with their teams.

So in a way, organizations delegate the responsibility of understanding the way products affect the user to designers and user researchers. What happens beyond the impact on users is usually not within the scope of user research. Designers and user researchers are supposed to advocate for users. To many organizations that’s not an ethical consideration though; it’s to avoid inadvertently producing stuff that nobody wants to buy.

Because of that, those who perform user research have a say in selecting the target group too. The problem is that often the researchers don’t have formal decision-making power. They’re advocates, but the more business-oriented people get to be the judges. And sure, these decision makers can’t know all the UX details, while their role (sidenote: Perhaps designers should have been business-oriented. Then perhaps we wouldn't have had the domination of product management over design. ) is to make the business grow.

What I often see happening is that people in an organization trust that their UX team ensures they’re creating something good. At the same time, they accept that they’re living by market mechanics and that somebody (a business person) has to make the hard decisions. Everybody’s doing their best to do what their job demands of them. Everybody can point at somebody else being the reason for the organization continuing to have (at best) dubious impact on the world.

On the other hand: marketing, sales, business and customer support people all have channels to understand what users want and are willing to pay for. User research isn’t that special.

So we designers shouldn’t be too hard on each other—it’s not like Dieselgate happened because designers failed to explain to the Volkswagen execs why exhaust fumes are bad.

That other kind of design agency

One factor we usually consider when asking if somebody is responsible for something, is whether that person has agency. We can’t hold an enslaved miner responsible for destroying the environment—they don’t have agency over work decisions. But from the sole shareholder and managing director of a monopolistic company who is also a billionaire, we can expect a little more.

Similarly, a designer coming straight out of college with literally a tonne of debt has little choice but to find a well-paid job as fast as they can. Fifteen years later, that same designer may have a strong resume, paid off their debt and mortgage and have a secure job leading a design team. At that stage, it may be easier to stick their neck out and risk losing their job.

They may not feel like it though—slowly having saved some money, they may have got used to the idea of being okay with working for money, or living comfortably on a big salary. The better your situation gets, the more you have to lose.

When a person gets richer, they get more powerful. With power comes safety and choice and with that, agency. Spider-Man fans know: With great power comes great responsibility. That means that if you gain power, it’d be good to get yourself into a position where you can make good decisions for other people, without that affecting your personal situation too much.

This includes making your lifestyle not too dependent on your current job. Taking responsibility doesn’t just mean making sure you can keep the mansion close to the private school for your kids. It means making sure that your work doesn’t lead to pollution which would force other families to move.

Back to the fresh-out-of-college designer. Are entry-level workers off the hook, because the bosses take the lion’s share of the money and the responsibility that comes with it? I wouldn’t go that far. Even someone at the start of their career has privileges. They only even have a shot at a design job, because of the required (versatile) education/experience and the design culture in their area. The likelihood that they can pay back their student loan and earn multiple times that thereafter is a privilege too.

Even if you’ve been in a position where you believed you didn’t have a choice accepting a design job, I’m sure even at that time there would have been types of jobs you’d have refused. So you didn’t have to design tobacco/gambling/candy ads.

Agency is super relevant when assessing who has responsibility for the impact of innovations. This is not specific to design though!

Just take responsibility already!

Despite the arguments against designers being special, I still feel differently about it.

If you’re in it for the money, you chose the wrong job

Design work isn’t paid particularly well. I mean it’s not bad, but our coworkers in similar roles at engineering and product management take a lot more from the salary pie. Maybe that’s because many designers are motivated by the potential positive impact of our work? With the broad skill set required for design, it shouldn’t be too hard to switch to better paying jobs—I see that happen all the time.

So if so many of us designers are in it for our ideals rather than the money, we shouldn’t put ourselves into a position where we’re forced to give up those ideals just for another month of salary.

I admit that this is not a strong argument, because a career in design may in fact be a step up from your previous vocation. And the argument depends on the current oversupply of designers. Then still: I know a lot of designers aren’t in it for the money alone.

Products have impact on users beyond their primary purpose

Let’s consider a common product category: cars. They take a user from one place to another comfortably, but put other people at risk of injury and death, and burn fossil fuels while doing it. Is that user-friendly in the long run? Reinforcement of an inefficient, unhealthy, climate-disrupting transport system likely puts that same user’s life at risk in various ways. I’d say the downsides of that just don’t compensate for that primary product function. But by continuing to frame transportation within a short-term context, car and advertisement designers mislead users just to keep their jobs.

For other products it’s harder to say what the (indirect) side effects of products could be for their users. On the other hand, it should be quite obvious that online platforms for unregulated alternatives to regulated businesses may lead to the problems the regulations were created for in the first place (a.k.a. Airbnb, Uber). Or that VC-backed startups aiming to become the biggest player that gets the most funding and can buy up the competitors in the end will have a hard time being affordable and user-centered in the long run.

More importantly though: why would we only care for our users? Why would we exclude other stakeholders and the environment from benefiting? Just because we indirectly get a few cents from the customer, and not from the other stakeholders? I thought we were intrinsically motivated!

Now I think it’s totally okay if you like the activities that are part of doing design and you’re in the design profession because of that. That’s the best! What I don’t think is okay, is messing up our environment and society because you like post-its and vector drawing tools.

Now what is it?

Sometimes I find it helpful to argue for the opposite of what I feel. I started this post based on the notion that designers are more responsible for the impact of products than others in an organization. Now I still do, but I don’t think it’s very helpful to generalize like that. Especially with the very diverse audience of my blog, I wouldn’t want to make assumptions about you specifically.

To me, ethics are primarily an approach for a person to decide how to live best. The whole point of ethics is that people can identify their own values and do their own thinking. So instead of writing about ‘designers’, maybe I should have written about ‘me, as a designer’.

Asking who’s responsible often leads to people blaming others and nobody trying to fix anything. If we’re to decide who’s responsible for the climate before doing anything, we can all point at our ancestors and continue to head for 4-degree-disaster scenarios.

More useful questions people (not just designers!) could ask themselves are of course:

1. How am I, with my team, responsible for the impact of this specific project we’re working on?
2. And if so: what is that impact, beyond company revenue, the primary function of the product/feature and its initial user experience?
3. What can I do to improve that?
4. And how can I maximize my positive impact as a professional beyond my current project?

On the other hand: in my case that only led to rumination. Until I realized I could just find a job and be done with it.

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Many thanks to Jan Dittrich for reviewing an earlier and even longer version of this post!

How do you feel about these questions?

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