Dear Friends,
The New York Times Sunday Review has an interesting article for those who design products and services. It is an useful discussion piece for seminars in the ethics of design, as well as for seminars on research ethics.
While the authors do not intend to do so, they highlight participatory design as the “blank spot” in most cases of service design involving corporate, institutional, and government policy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/please-corporations-experiment-on-us.html
From the opening paragraphs:
—snip—
CAN it ever be ethical for companies or governments to experiment on their employees, customers or citizens without their consent?
The conventional answer — of course not! — animated public outrage last year after Facebook published a study in which it manipulated how much emotional content more than half a million of its users saw. Similar indignation followed the revelation by the dating site OkCupid that, as an experiment, it briefly told some pairs of users that they were good matches when its algorithm had predicted otherwise.
But this outrage is misguided. Indeed, we believe that it is based on a kind of moral illusion.
Companies — and other powerful actors, including lawmakers, educators and doctors — “experiment” on us without our consent every time they implement a new policy, practice or product without knowing its consequences. When Facebook started, it created a radical new way for people to share emotionally laden information, with unknown effects on their moods. And when OkCupid started, it advised users to go on dates based on an algorithm without knowing whether it worked.
Why does one “experiment” (i.e., introducing a new product) fail to raise ethical concerns, whereas a true scientific experiment (i.e., introducing a variation of the product to determine the comparative safety or efficacy of the original) sets off ethical alarms?
—snip—
Worth reading.
Best
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
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