Action 6: Identifying Ethical/Humanitarian Design through the actions of User Research & Experience Design

As a designer I have always agreed to the notion that designers are problem solvers. Everything around us, that we interact with, has been designed for a purpose, to make our lives better. While you are reading this….just look around at the things kept near you. It could be your mobile phone, your laptop, you might have a pen near you. All these things that you interact with need to fulfill a purpose, or else they are of no use to you.

Now that we are living in the post pandemic world, a lot of things have changed. We are more comfortable keeping our distance from others and this is for everyone’s safety. For instance, I try to make monetary transactions online more often than I did before. This way I do not have to worry about sanitizing my hands which I would have done if it were physical money. Our dependence on anything electronic has grown manifolds.

But now that everything around us is literally undergoing a massive change, I feel that as designers we need to reconsider the ‘goodness’ of everything – in terms of benefit to individuals, society and the world – how we practice our work and what we create.

What is ethical design?

A very comprehensive definition can be found on encyclopedia.com, which states:

Design ethics concerns moral behavior and responsible choices in the practice of design. It guides how designers work with clients, colleagues, and the end users of products, how they conduct the design process, how they determine the features of products and how they assess the ethical significance of the products that result from the activity of designing.

Given the current scenario where everything is undergoing a major re-design there are eight focus areas that need to be kept in mind while designing. These are,

• Society
• Sustainability
• Focus
• Persuasion
• User Involvement
• Privacy
• Accessibility
• Usability

After deciding to explore ethical design through User Research, I realized how vast this field is and in order to get started I would have to start small. After reading a bit about ethical design I will try to come up with an action where I can use design to map the focus of a user.