"And like any profession with the power to influence lives - doctors, lawyers, policymakers - designers will need a strong foundation in ethics. This is the core reason I developed the Five Pillars of Ethical Interface Design - an evolving framework I actively invite other designers to engage with and offer feedback on. The pillars are meant to push designers to confront the moral weight of their decisions rather than hide behind aesthetics, heuristics, or empathy theater."
"The truth is designers rarely operate from a neutral position. Even when they insist they're "designing for the user," their own assumptions, values, and biases inevitably slip into the work - usually without them noticing. This is mainly due to what I call ethical misalignment - the gap between the user values designers think they're honoring and the internal values that actually shape their decisions."
Designers will shift from hands-on making to defining how people interact with machines and establishing moral guardrails. The Five Pillars of Ethical Interface Design provides a framework to compel designers to recognize the moral consequences of interface decisions. Designers do not act from a neutral standpoint; personal assumptions, values, and biases seep into design work. Ethical misalignment occurs when perceived user values diverge from the internal values that actually inform decisions. The practice of treating empathy as a proxy for values enables projection and dangerous assumptions. Observing behavior and imagining internal states cannot substitute for rigorous research and ethical grounding.
Read at Medium
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]