I find it odd when folk act as if their discipline is immune to bad actors, so it must be the fault of The Other.
- “A developer would never do X without product managers forcing them.”
- “A designer would never do Y, so a developer must have made that decision.”
- … and so on …
I can understand the reflexive “I wouldn’t have done that” — I’ve felt it myself — but I find the move to “nobody in my field would do that” strange and unhelpful.
First — when somebody tells you to do something dumb or unethical “no” is a whole sentence.
There’s a quote from Victor Papanek’s “Design for the Real World” I love. It’s not the oft repeated first line of the book (“There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them”) — but later on when he’s talking about “The Myth of the Designer’s Lack of Control”:
I see that lack of control myth in lots of professions ATM.
Yes there will be consequences for that “no” — maybe bad ones — but it’s there as an option.
If I help make something happen then I’m part of the problem. I don’t get to avoid responsibility by saying “somebody told me to”. Folk have been arguing that point for hundreds of years.
Second — what’s at work is almost always a complicated mess of feedback loops, incentives, and motivations — and that system includes me and mine.
I don’t solve anything if all I do is point a finger at one group in that system.
When you dig into the motivations and explanations for particular behaviours you almost always discover a much more complicated story than a moustache-twirling villain.
Yes, those systems are complicated, hard to change, and ever harder to ignore (insert your favourite “it’s capitalism” meme here) — but pretending they don’t exist is not going to work either.
Finally — and most importantly — people do bad things!
Being a developer / designer / researcher / product manager / whatever doesn’t make people magically immune to that.
Developers just want to make good tools. Sometimes those tools harm people. Amazingly smart and talented developers are happily creating ransomware, and social media bot nets, stealing content to train AI models, coding their way around legal & regulatory issues, etc.
UX folk want to understand people, and use that understanding when designing systems. Sometimes they use that understanding to harm people. Amazingly smart and talented UX folk are happily finding ways to trick people into subscribing to things they don’t want to, or gambling more money than they can spare, or finding ways to target vulnerable populations, etc.
(Repeat for product managers, for content strategist, for… whomever.)
This doesn’t happen because of the discipline they’re in.
This doesn’t happen because they’re forced to by The Other.
This happens because they’re unaware of the bad impact, or don’t care about it, or are in favour of it, or value the challenge of the work more, or the paycheck, or some combination thereof.
Because understanding how to use a particular set of skills doesn’t magically make you a good person.
Or a bad one.
Which is why I’m super suspicious when any single group or another tries to own the ethical high ground.
TL;DR: If you think My Discipline is Good, and Other Discipline is Bad then you are fooling yourself — and avoiding the work that needs to be done to make things better.
ttfn.
