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Trust between family and friends and neighbors is built up over time and interactions. ‘I know I can trust my neighbor to watch over our house when we aren’t home, I know I can trust my friend Rachel to keep our private conversations private..’ But everyday way put our trust in people we don’t know, and that we may never interact with.

In August 2016 how much we depend on each other became very clear to Morten and his wife. Their son Leo was eager to explore the world and arrived 6 weeks early. The first few hours of Leo’s life were filled with tests, and hours of time under a blue light. The time in the neonatal unit was filled with stress but he sat down with a doctor who explained what to expect moving forward.
“We will do everything we can to give him the capability to live a full life.” – Doctor
“Do what you think is right doctor, we trust you completely.” – Morten and his wife.

Entering into a hospital to receive care is one of the more high trust actions we can make as people. Why do we trust these perfect strangers with our lives? ETHICS.

We live in a society rooted in common ethics. When we interact with people we don’t know we choose to believe they adhere to those ethics in their interactions with us. In the case of professionals like doctors, structural engineers, lawyers, politicians, there is an additional layer of trust added by professional ethics. These ethics hold each practitioner accountable for their work so when something goes wrong we can ask ‘were they in breech of their ethics?’ and if so they can be deemed untrustworthy and lose their right to practice.

Ethics is woven into the fabric of our society. 

He and his wife watched over their son in the NICU for 3 weeks. A nurse came up to him and asked ‘how do social network sites make money?’ Morten told her to imagine a giant blue monster

We know a lot fo stuff on the internet is not built with the best interest of the user online. That means that when ‘essential workers’ come to the internet with their private and financial and health information they WANT to trust us but they are starting to suspect that trust is misplaced.

The trust of the online world is eroding. In the wake of eroding trust comes government interventions. WE HAVE WORK TO DO. We need to start acting like the professionals we want to become, and the first step is to embrace ethics as part of our practice.

To have a meaningful conversation about ethics, we need to define our terms. We use morals and ethics all the time in our day to day language. In the tech world, conversations about ethics have gathered momentum. In the new pandemic, we’re having conversations about ethics with each other every day.

What is the difference morals and ethics?

Morals:

Ethics:

Ethics are not lists of rules and regulations but they can be used to create such lists. They aren’t universal.

Consider the current issue of wearing masks in public. We have different opinions on this, and our opinions are based strongly in our personal individual morals.

As a society, we need to make rules on how we interact with each other. In some regions, masking is recommended and the vast majority of people wear masks to protect others. In other regions, masking is mandatory – in those regions the ethics say society has a moral obligation to protect all people and require the use of masks. In other regions, masking is voluntary and there are no official recommendations. The ethics of those regions puts personal freedoms first and views the imposition of masks as a violation of that belief.

This is why ethics is complicated.

How do we as individual moral actors establish and agreed upon framework?
How do we as people know what is right or wrong? Ethics is a practice.

How do we build ethics into our design and development practice? How do we as designers, developers, and creators think and act?

We must rediscover what the web is all about. The web is an information publishing network. The web in its simplest form gives us the capability to share our thoughts and creations with the world, and access the thoughts and creations of other people. Web design at its core is capability centered design.

Question: What is the difference between human-centered design and capability centered design?
“Noe som skurrer” – it refers to the sound you hear when an engine isn’t working quite right.Is the like button in social media ethical? No, we know it’s addictive and the way it’s used to profile users and
Human centered design being implemented without serious consideration and care opens the door to what he calls design instrumentalism. The human becomes the instrument through which the design works to achieve the goal of the designer or their employer.

Human Centered Design is a good design principal, but from an ethics standpoint it isn’t sufficient. It needs ethics added into it.

Design is inherently POLITICAL. Designers have been talking about the political implications of design for at least 100 years.

“If a thing is designed to kill you, it is by definition bad design. You are responsible for what you put into the world and how it affects the world.” – Mike Monteiro

As designers, we make choices on behalf of the people we design for – what they can and cannot access, what they can and cannot do… and nowhere is this more on display than on the web. So yeah, Human-Centered Design is a good design principle, but from an ‘I want to leave the world a better place than where I found it’ perspective, we have work to do.

Make ethical reflection part of your daily personal and professional practice. Learn about doing things through the lens of ethics.

DOING
Applying ethical principles to decision making at every level of your practice. Actively rooting everything you do in ethical principles to make better solutions that work for everyone.There is a term to describe a true-north of ethics: Human Flourishing. Morten thinks this should be the true North for web design as well.

Yes to Progressive Enhancement, and NO to Crypto-Miners as an alternative to online advertising.

Yes to blocking hateful and harmful speech online because speech acts have real consequences and no to surveillance capitalism.

Utilitarianism looks at the utility of the design for its users.

Duty ethics looks at the intention of the designer.

Virtue ethics looks at who the designer becomes by making the design.This leaves one gaping hold in the process – THE USER! This is where are relatively new branch of moral philosophy comes in and what makes the whole process work.

Unlike the other moral philosophies, capability approach focuses solely upon the autonomy and capabilities of the person being acted upon.

An action is right if it grants or enables those acted upon capabilities in the form of real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value, whether or not they take those actions.We see capability approach in design thinking all the time although we never explicitly think about it in these terms. People need solutions that work for them in their context.What Morten calls ‘The 4 Corners Approach’

Start with Capabilities, then move to Utility, then to Duties, then to Virtues, then back to Capabilities again.

Remember, the being part is about making ethical reflection part of your daily personal and professional practice. The 4 Corners Approach is your guide as you start exploring this idea.

We’re all sitting here thinking ’this stuff is HEAVY, and not very applicable to what I do…’ Morten feels us, he’s spent the last 20 years of his life trying to embody the BEING part. This is a practice the same way meditation is a practice. It takes time, dedication, trial and error.

There’s also a good chance that you’re in a work situation that makes you feel like you’re a cog in a mindless machine. This ‘being’ part is something we have to do together, and it will take time. It’s also how we build TRUST.

WE, ALL OF US TOGETHER, HAVE WORK TO DO.

The good news is there is also a ‘doing’ part, and this part is immediately applicable. Let’s explore how to apply ethics in your design practice.

(this is the first time he’s every presented this, exciting!)

This is made up of 4 concentric circles.

Center: Core capability

Material capabilities

Meta capabilities

Outside: Environment capabilities

What capability or capabilities we intend to grant the user through the design (what is the purpose of the design?). On the web this is almost always related to information exchange in one form or another. The core capabilities become the ‘True North’ for the project.

What capabilities are furnished, afforded, or otherwise provided to the user by the materials used for the communication (printed paper, audio, video, webpage, an app, etc). Examples of capabilities: folding, transporting, writing, sending. We consider the nature of what the core capabilities are, what materials are best suited to achieve those, and what additional capabilities are afforded by the materials we choose.

Capabilities afforded by the material that can be added to the exchange. A hyperlink is a meta capability – it adds the capability of linking from one document to another. These are also accessibility features like alt text and captions. Anytime we add a hypertext feature to an HTML document, we are adding meta capabilities to the core capabilities. We need to make sure these meta capabilities are appropriate and improve our chance of core capability success, and that the core capabilities are NOT dependent on the meta capabilities.

Capabilities added by the user’s environment (we usually have no control over whether they’re available or not). The most obvious examples are: all browser features, auto-translation features in browsers, reader mode, appleTV / Chromecast, etc. Common to all of these is that we as designers don’t know if they’re available or if the end-user will even use them. We can design for them and advise users to take advantage of them if they are beneficial to the success of the core capabilities. These also extend beyond the basic design we’ve created – for example social sharing and reposting.

The 4 Corners Approach and the Core Capability Framework make up what Morten calls Capability Centered Design. This is what practical ethics for a modern web developer can look like. This ethical practice will help you do work furthering human flourishing.

This also gives you an actionable framework to take on all the sticky ethical issues the arise in web design projects.

Trust is the currency of interactions, and it is the currency we as web designers need to invest in. 

He hears, ‘but Morten, there is ALWAYS a person who is desperate enough to do the unethical thing… so even if I don’t do it, someone else will.’ This is the problem of evil, and it’s not a problem he can solve, but we can make it less relevant by being humble, accountable, self-aware, and being graceful to ourselves and our peers when we make mistakes.

With every design decision, we build a future for our users and ourselves. Build the future, that’s the work. “What we can or cannot do is rarely a function of our true capability, but more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.” – Albert Camus