Conversation

Notices

1. Annalee Newitz (annaleen@wandering.shop)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 18:44:14 JST Annalee Newitz

   Joining #mastodon has reminded me how much #UX is a form of community politics. Discussions over usability, searchability, federability (sounds awkward but you know what I mean) -- these reflect debates we are having right now in many aspiring democracies. Where do we want people to live? What will we build to make it easy to get around? What kinds of social services should be available? How do we manage borders? UX choices are political choices, and it's important to treat them as such.

   • Aral Balkan repeated this.
   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 18:44:13 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @annaleen This is rather meta but the term itself is problematic. #UX is a practice created by #SiliconValley/#BigTech with colonial and anthropological biases codified within it. It begins with the generally-accepted othering of “users”, the “them” (usually dumb folks) that “we” (the smart tech people) design for. It relies on using cognitive/behavioural psychology and surveillance to craft mechanisms that make some of us billionaires and leave others deciding between food or warmth in winter.

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 18:48:04 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @annaleen … It definitely doesn’t just mean “design.”

     Also see:

     - Ethical Design Manifesto: https://ind.ie/ethical-design/

     - Small Tech Principles: https://small-tech.org/about/#small-technology

     #ux #SiliconValley #BigTech #design #EthicalDesign #SmallTech

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 19:03:45 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Fish Id Wardrobe

     @fishidwardrobe Yes and “startup” doesn’t have to mean “venture-capital-funded disposable business that hyper-scales and exits or goes bankrupt as quickly as possible.” But it does. So you can call your tiny sustainable business a startup because it sounds cool and then, if/when a real startup decides to “disrupt” you by investing their $5M in VC to price you out of the market, you might wonder what happened. If we are not like them, let’s not use their terms. “Design” is enough.

     @annaleen

   • Fish Id Wardrobe (fishidwardrobe@mastodon.me.uk)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 19:03:46 JST Fish Id Wardrobe

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan

     @aral @annaleen But it doesn't have to mean that. It's certainly not *supposed* to mean that. It's supposed to centre the design of the interface around the experience of the people using it. "User Experience". That should be the opposite of what you describe — although I agree it often isn't.

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 19:08:38 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Fish Id Wardrobe

     @fishidwardrobe (Because if we have any legitimacy in working on and creating ethical alternatives to Silicon Valley’s toxic bullshit, every time we use one of their terms, we legitimise them. Your ethical non-startup “startup” will never see a dime of the hundreds of millions of dollars Google Ventures and other VCs invest in actual startups (they know what’s a startup and what isn’t) but they’ll happily point at yours and say “look, startups are doing good in the world”.

     @annaleen

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 19:12:13 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Fish Id Wardrobe

     @fishidwardrobe …Ditto with “UX” (User eXperience design) which is about understanding your target (nice word, no?) audience so you can manipulate their behaviour for profit. That manipulation includes getting them to reveal as much as possible about themselves in a feedback loop. (Surveillance capitalism itself is the feedback loop between those with accrued wealth investing it systems of surveillance to accrue information which, in turn, they use to accrue more wealth.)

     @annaleen

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 19:15:29 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Fish Id Wardrobe

     @fishidwardrobe … “UX” is the means by which you decorate your product so that the livestock you’re farming as the cornerstone of your business model doesn’t notice that they’re being farmed, manipulated, and exploited. (You need them to stay where they are, not get scared and bolt off.)

     If that’s not what you’re doing. If you practice design, not decoration, I would strongly urge you not to use UX to describe what you do. You’re a designer. You practice design.

     </rant> (sorry) :)

     @annaleen

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jan-2023 17:28:08 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • fanf42
     • Celia Hodent

     @fanf42 Human-computer interaction, yes, UX? Don Norman, Apple (Silicon Valley). And even then it wasn’t what it is today. It was far more about a wholistic approach to design, not necessarily the misuse of behavioural psychology to decorate otherwise unpalatable business models with shiny objects of desire and addiction.

     Thanks for the link to Celia’s talk. Bookmarked to watch. And here are two of mine you might enjoy:

     https://ar.al/talks/#superheroes-and-villains-in-design

     https://ar.al/talks/#design-or-decoration

     @annaleen @CeliaHodent

   • fanf42 (fanf42@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jan-2023 17:28:10 JST fanf42

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     • Celia Hodent

     @aral @annaleen UX is much older than silicon Valley, and UX researchers like @CeliaHodent violently condemn a non benevolent def of UX. We should call the appropriation of the term you describe scam or abuse or something picturing what it's really about, and keep UX design for the positive idea of making the user experience (incl us, incl long term goals like sustainability) of the tools we create the best possible.
     Also, "what UX is really about" is an excellent book by Celia talking a/b that

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 22-Jan-2023 02:45:29 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • fanf42
     • Celia Hodent

     @CeliaHodent Thanks for the link.

     Sadly, as long as our approaches to design are colonial (“us”, the experts, designing for “them”, the users), we will always be beholden to whether the first group are benevolent or not. A non-colonial approach to design would involve those who use the things designing the things (and the role of design theory, etc., as I see it, is to enable them to do so by making the knowledge and tools as freely available as possible).

     @fanf42 @annaleen

   • Celia Hodent (celiahodent@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 22-Jan-2023 02:45:30 JST Celia Hodent

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     • fanf42

     @fanf42 @aral @annaleen thanks for the mention! This piece by JJ Garrett is also reflecting well the sentiment that UX (or HCI or however you want to call it) today is sadly not the benevolent mindset it was supposed to be

     https://www.fastcompany.com/90642462/ux-design-is-more-successful-than-ever-but-its-leaders-are-losing-hope

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 22-Jan-2023 17:02:59 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • fanf42
     • Celia Hodent

     @CeliaHodent Thanks. Although what I’m referring to eschews the corporate system altogether. You can’t make a Google or a Facebook, etc., kinder. They are what they are. Their business model is what it is. (And what they are are factory farms for human beings.) The most we can do is provide them with better PR or enable them to decorate their extractive and exploitative tools better so their target audience – the livestock being farmed (us) – doesn’t get scared and bolt.

     @fanf42 @annaleen

   • Celia Hodent (celiahodent@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 22-Jan-2023 17:03:00 JST Celia Hodent

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     • fanf42

     @aral @fanf42 @annaleen if I’m following you well, I would then direct you to Humanity Centered hmntycntrd.com and the work of Vivianne Castillo, Alba Vilamil.

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 22-Jan-2023 17:04:44 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • fanf42
     • Celia Hodent

     @CeliaHodent I’m actually not sure it’s even possible to implement what I’m talking about in the US as the general imagination is so captured by corporate culture that it’s almost impossible for folks to impossible a non-corporate approach. Maybe we have a chance to in Europe. Who knows. But it’s the approach we’re taking with the Small Tech and the Small Web and its principles:

     https://small-tech.org/about/#small-technology

     (Which grew out https://ind.ie/ethical-design/)

     @fanf42 @annaleen