The Burden of Proof
A letter to the next generation of digital designers.
The Burden of Proof is written as a letter to the next generation of digital designers, with the hope of opening their eyes to the psychological dangers that we as designers unintentionally create for our users – despite the fact that we may never have direct proof of those efforts and results, thanks to high-speed product iterations and technical innovations that are changing the technological landscape every day.
Distinction Award, Master’s Dissertation
Royal College of Art, School of Design (2020)
Purpose: Master’s Dissertation
Date: July 2020
read the full pdf here
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This is a long paper, I’d argue it’s worth the read but it’s 40 pages, understandable that you probably won’t. Instead, here’s the foreword, which I think covers all the bases:
With the understanding that in this day and age, people tend to
skim, browse, and ingest only small portions of the excessive
amounts of information they pass by every day, I thought it would
be best to condense my thoughts and warning here.1
As a designer in this modern digital world, you have an immense challenge and responsibility ahead of you. The last two decades have brought the introduction of digital design, the rise of targeted marketing and advertising campaigns, and the explosion of social media platforms—amazing technological innovations that bring economic growth and numerous benefits for humankind.
Technology continues to progress and evolve, and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future–it’s your job to try and keep up. But as you continue to adapt to the changing landscape, inevitably helping others around you to adapt as well, be vigilant of the rising generation—those who are starting from scratch with no preexisting expectations, prejudices, boundaries, or safeguards. Lucky for us, they’re resilient by nature, but they’re not impervious
to harm.
In what’s quickly becoming the largest collective group of users in history, warning signs are beginning to show, indicating deeper problems that are going unaddressed. Within the last 10 years in the United States, we are seeing record highs in depression and suicide rates among children and teens.2 This is heartbreaking, but one major obstacle sits in the way of making effective change—we can’t precisely pinpoint what the cause of this rise is.
We don’t have definitive proof.3
Now, it’s not my place to say that it’s your duty to protect every single individual from every potentially harmful thing, but I believe that you do have the responsibility to give them the best
fighting chance.
At its most basic level, digital design is a series of experiments and periods of assessment. You come up with a concept, try it out, observe the results, and make changes—restarting the process. But like any good scientific experiment, it’s necessary to learn what went wrong and make changes. It’s described beautifully in a book I was reading by Henry Petroski, To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure.4 Petroski is an engineer—and it comes across in his book—who describes the ultimate goal of engineering feats; progress. “No matter how devastating a failure, its consequences can be even greater if its lessons are not learned and heeded.” 5
I’m writing this letter to you, with the goal of emphasizing the impact of digital design on today’s modern world and breaking down the problem surrounding the rising generation of users. My hope is that by going back to the genesis of digital design, I can clarify its core pillars—context, content, and users—and propose the addition of a fourth pillar to close the gap, being psychology.
This is a problem that needs to be addressed now, but you need to start by understanding the gravity of the situation. Christopher Wylie is someone who deeply understands the nature of the fire we are playing with. As a founding member of a company that “experimented with scaled online disinformation, fake news, and mass profiling,” 6 weaponized through Facebook, a story I’ll tell later, he describes your challenge perfectly:
Scale is the elephant in the room. – If these problems are too big for you to solve on the fly, why should you be allowed to release untested products before you understand their potential consequences for society? 7
As you understand the scale of the problem, I know you will see the crucial role that psychology needs to play in our initial design process. Then, hopefully, you’ll take my advice and start building something more responsible than we ever could.
2. NCHS (National Center for Health Statistics - U.S.) Data Brief, ‘Death Rates Due to Suicide and Homicide Among Persons Aged 10–24: United States, 2000–2017’, 2019, < https://www. cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/ db352-h.pdf> [accessed 28 October 2020].
3. One thing to note, I was personally born and raised in U.S., and the majority of my research has been conducted within the states, but despite a lack of references I have no doubt that these trends extend to this same group worldwide.
4. Henry Petroski, To forgive design: understanding failure, 1st edn (Cambridge, Massachusetts,
USA: Harvard University Press, 2014)
5. Ibid. p. 23.
6. Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck (New York, USA/; Random House, 2019) , p. 16.
7. Ibid. p. 256.