Information technology design ethics #

Approaching humanism through the lens of understanding people in a snap #

Once upon a time, I looked for missing books at my college library. I had one of the best finding rates of anyone that had that position before me, and for years after. The secret to my success was in looking for each book as though it were a story: a person pulled it off the shelf for a reason, and a person put it away.  

I used the information I had — the Library of Congress (LOC) codes, or if some subjects had multiple books missing. But it was always how people interacted with information that made the story, and the story that helped me find the books. The data was static, the LOC code very clearly telling everyone where it belonged in space. In between removing it and placing it on a shelf were all the things that could happen as a book was moved and leveraged, and all the things that tired, stressed, excited, etc., people do. The LOC was orientation, findability, and navigation. The book was the encapsulated rich data, the information it contained the future-sense desire, and the people…well, people. 

As I traveled through life, these insights kept popping up. I thought about them as I painted, wondering about the magnets of perception and how so much of our perceptions are predicated on our existing stories. Those existing stories, meanwhile, were everywhere. I spent entire days watching people in downtown Boston navigate their surrounding world while applying their existing stories — usually in the form of stereotypes. I watched new people meeting for the first time bring into the interactions their own sense making, built on stereotypes and personal comfort levels around a slew of characteristics that would shift by person and context. 

Through it all, I wasn’t problem-solving my own status — which is our cultural norm. By many standards I am socially inept. I was always applying logic, critical thinking, and triangulated facts around the stories of the recurring people in my life, even while clearly having strong empathy. It was dissonant with expectations.

I just wanted to understand. I, quite frankly, had given up ever being  allowed a “place” in the social framework. I’d had goalposts moved so frequently and repeatedly that I actively distrusted when people dangled equivocal acceptance, “do this and I’ll like you,” or “do this and you’ll get that.” Almost everyone will do that eventually, for the simple reason that they want something, and they see you as able to contribute, and we've been mass trained to conditionality.

This is ultimately a model built on acceptance, because that’s what I wanted for myself. I never really got it, and I don’t care any more, for the simple reason that our current culture is not accepting. We are urged to think the worst of people, to use arbitrary characteristics as signals of quality, to use people and assume that everyone else — or at least everyone smart enough to want to work with — is doing the same to us, until and unless they prove otherwise. 

But people are not that simple. Language, culture, the color of skin/eyes/hair, financial success — none of it actually signaled trust, an adhesion to reality, or a willingness to problem solve beyond status.  I’ve wandered widely within the cultures of the US, and this is a pervasive trait. People are getting burned over and over again, just because they wish so hard for the solution to be that simple: to know in an instant whether someone is going to screw you over.

The only real, working approach that I’ve found is to allow a modicum of trust at the start. Try to understand people as they understand the world around them — focusing on their interpretations of others, with a strong dollop of transference (they know to look for what they know to exist within themselves; it's a cognitive bias). Once my trust — not followthrough, not organization, but actually abusing my trust for lopsided gain — is breached, it’s nearly impossible to regain.

If you’ve been living in non-acceptance of others, you’ll be amazed at how easy walking down the street becomes. Suddenly having quick 1-5 minute conversations with people you know you’ll never meet again is a no-brainer behavior. And you’ll leave those conversations a little happier than you started them. The world will be a less scary place. 

Bad actors exist, and are most easily understood as the ‘dark triad’. They want to go unrecognized, taking on and pushing for characteristics-as-signals. They will always tip their hand in time. A “modicum of trust” is not giving them keys to your home, but simply meeting people with enough acceptance that they don’t feel like they have something to prove first. It gives usurious people an opening, but I truly believe our greater-species characteristic is one of collaboration and problem-solving. Our cultural expectations are simply under a thrall. 

Information technology is a tool. As with any tool, it can be used to help or harm. Ethics is, ultimately, our developing understanding of the help/harm spectrum.

My goal is to work towards humanism. I want people to work. Not “work” as in “get a job,” but for us, as an intelligent species, to keep existing so long that all the ideas in this book would elicit a reaction of antiquated wrongheadedness or cliche understanding. 

There’s a lot of hope in that wish. The hope that what I’ve barely begun understanding will be useful enough to others. The hope that we’ll continue to have cultures that embrace learning and the change that comes with it. It also, at it’s furthest reaches, embraces a hope that our species and planet survives: physically, culturally, socially. 

Physically: our potable waters are drying up, our seas are rising, and our weather patterns are changing. These big brush strokes should terrify us. There is zero chance that these are butterfly wings causing hurricanes; these are outcomes of compounded miscalculation and blindness. For most of us, it just seems so much less immediate than the need to decide what’s for dinner, and how we might pay for it. We still see ourselves as somehow separate from the rest of existence. The idea that this understanding could find traction in our societal mien is a hope, mostly undefined. Yet, it’s also necessary. We can’t physically survive if we continue to assume that we are somehow categorically different from the living world around us. 

Culturally, to develop a list of all the things we’re at loggerheads about would be depressing and defeatist. I don’t have any forward motion to talk about with most of them. But I have a few ideas about information architecture and design ethics, which is absolutely impacting the whole and could be shifted to impact it in a different way.

Socially? Well, we’re still confounding culture with society — an at-hand solution with a universal solution. We think society is providing insect nets to everyone, while ignoring that the at-hand, on-the-ground cultures have either better uses for the nets, or the nets aren’t as useful in their use case.

We have all these problems, but we also have information structures that are hitting another point of growing pains. We’ve been expanding our data stores dramatically. Data is being defined and captured everywhere, and being logged and kept and referenced. Many of us trust the patterns of those historical data points without context, leveraging our cognitive biases to supply meaning and promoting the outcomes we think beneficial. If it only benefits a few? If the data captured only tells the story supported by the assumed outcomes?

In information architecture, the way I practice it as outlined in this book, context is everything. People, beyond the data captured and computed, are the meaning makers. Until our technology can keep up with the meaning and reality people really are wrapping their heads around, we’re in growing pains.

Those growing pains can be seen in the constant sense of failing personal agency that people lash out to various and sundry others as the ones at fault for various reasons. It’s in the inability to find the help needed – medical, to fix an account, to actually get what is being billed, in trying to meet expectations that look good in a computed formula but don’t match experience.

The cool thing about growing pains: if they are acknowledged and worked, it’s an opportunity to shift gears. 

Any opportunity to shift gears upsets the workings as it exists, and in every system that chugs to an outcome that didn’t end in utter failure, someone found success. In their short-sightedness, or lack of empathy, or cognitive biases, or greed, or assumptions of replicability, or lack of understanding of the sheer breadth and depth of the structures involved, they will fight the change. 

Despite how it feels, the codes of our programs and websites are not as entrenched compared to our culture codes. We’re still just laying the foundations. We’re already thinking about the information abstractly, but it’s out of sync with the complexity of reality. Right now, what we see is the power of information to shift culture – but it’s shifted in a way that leaves us at loggerheads, prone to verbal abuse that will repeat itself until it reaches more and more tipping points into physicalized violence. Culture is being more nimble than information technology; the multitude is emerging, while the finite remains entrenched. It's simply a failure of imagination, and reaching for goals that wobble the entire structure out of balance.

Information did this. Information, I hope, can undo this. 

There are a few key things that can make our software more humane. The most important — and hardest — is allowing for individual agency, agnostic of our -isms.  Individual agency needs information, without deceptive design.  It needs control over personal information, so our individual patterns aren’t used to our detriment; and it needs access to relevant information for any particular decision, without an oversight/uninvolved-determined right to availability. In a perfect world, that accessible information is not only available, but also navigable, with traceable signals of who-ness and validation. 

Stating this a different way: each of us needs the freedom to access and determine the information that is relevant to our decisions, understand what thinking and cognitive biases helped to determined the housing information structures, and if/how the data was validated. Each of us need the agency to decide for ourselves whether we are going to take a provided solution, or try for another. Which also means we need multiple unusual solutions, not monopolies, not copy-cats, and not all adhering to all of the same best practices.

It’s not about culling data to fit outcomes of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but about making sure people can more easily and/or fully contextualize the story of it, understand the lenses and priorities in place when another human was deciding what information was presented, and starting to form an idea of how fulsome or curtailed their personal information stream is. 

If there are more of us looking to build for agency, a reasonable starting place is to understand the information people have access to and how people make decisions. We live in the stew of our cultures, and those cultures define agreements that help us start thinking and talking about concepts a little closer to a solution. Those cultures have their own core precepts and cognitive biases that we generally don’t acknowledge, but still get built into the solutions provided and experience.

Individual agency can feel scary. It definitely has been outside the comfort zone of some of the organizations I’ve worked with through the years. It feels like it’s just a different word for anarchy and lawlessness. It feels like it’s trusting others to do the right thing based purely on the dictates of their human (fallible) heart. It’s not. It’s just treating a person like an intelligent being who can navigate their own consequences, and who has potential contexts that we can’t begin to imagine. 

In a way, it means that we’ll start treating everyone like adults instead of 2-year-olds, with all the missteps and recalibrations that happens in that shift.

Individual agency also means that imposing cultural standards of right/wrong signifiers will fail in the long term. Abortion isn’t inherently wrong as an act in and of itself, yet today it is accepted or not depending on the culture. The significance of red is culturally based, and has use connotations that can be hard to navigate.

The reality is that most of us don’t practice free will. It’s hard. The path of least resistance is to acknowledge the provided patterns — from previous generations, from social systems, from cultures — and fit in. We see “how it works” and find a pathway through. The system has policing: what’s not indexed and connected doesn’t work simply and elegantly, isn’t understood, and can’t find community. It’s for reason; people can do idiot things, and we have bad actors. It’s also detrimental: we keep people in abusive relationships, toxic frameworks, and usurious social patterns. But individual agency is, potentially, the key to allowing data — and humanity — to continue with an emergence paradigm. It opens the door to potentially engaging free will.

These cultural standards are not unlike the Y2K bug. The code was built with the passing thought that a potential future change is too far away to make a difference. Then it was leveraged repetitively as a ‘best practice’, making its way into so many systems that no one really knew where it might be missed. It caused a scramble to avert potential disasters as the limitation was acknowledged — but first it had to be understood as something that wasn’t just the way it is. 

Culture codes are generationally embedded. That first step — admitting it’s not just the way it is — can be a doozy. Understanding that there is wisdom in some of them and rank fallacy in others, and then understanding which are which, are nearly as difficult. There are systems we need to build that honor culture — like agricultural knowledge. There are system we have built that are horrifyingly dismissive — like the pervasive, US-centric names fields.

Information technology can be agnostic of culture instead of built with culture as the starting point; but a void is a hard concept to build against. The positive-space form that can be more easily built against is “humanism”.

The culture embedded in so many of US systems are predicated on simply binaries. On/off. Right/wrong. Male/female. But one of the most pervasive and subliminal binaries is win/lose. We know it’s a binary for so many social cues. Shareholders can never get enough ‘winning’ to support the idea of workers being paid fairly. Eugenics doesn’t just try to get their race to breed more, but work hard to see that other races breed less.  A 32% vote, with 34% abstaining, is called a “mandate”. 

The simplest step to becoming more humanist is to ask: who is set up for success, who is set up for failure? If we assume both (which is a fair assumption in our current culture), we can develop the awareness and brutal self-honesty to see the harm/failure as well as the benefit. Is there really no way in which the predefined failed state could ever work? What are the emotions sparking as that failed state is actually considered as able to succeed? What “reasons” spark the same or balancing emotions? How can the failure be mitigated? Eradicated? How is it contextualized? What are the ethical and philosophical foundations of the failure states?

In short, we can search for the win-win scenario and the unspoken reasons why people are avoiding them.

This book can be a model for general review, a way to try to suss out abstractly what may or may not be skewing in a system. 

In technology development, a QA review asks the question, “is everything working the way intended, in as many ways as we can think to try to break it?” This kind of review would ask the question, “is the intended working agnostic for the physical and social environment, in as many ways as we can think to try to break it?” By the words, it’s a subtle shift from accepting the intention to questioning the intention, but in terms of behavior it is massive.

The models can be used to help formulate understandings and arguments of how an experience might skew or be skewed within interactions, and talk about it on-team or with stakeholders. It’s about questioning and understanding, to be better able to earmark what conversations might need to be had, and some diagrams that might help those conversations be a little less abstract. 

No matter what we think we know, we can’t hope to understand until the conversations are had. 

I’m sharing my understanding in the hopes that others will come to the same conclusion: that the most logical way to survive an unknown universe it to not make us a monoculture. I acknowledge that some won’t. Others don’t have to share what I believe, but if more people are willing to allow for a world where their ideas and my ideas can co-exist without escalating into anger, abuse, violence, and ultimately death…that’s close enough to work with. 

This isn’t about empathy, although empathy makes the shift into diversification infinitely easier. This is about the illogical assumption that characteristics are signals of ethical, moral, intellectual, and righteous pre-eminence. It’s about the need — in biology, in philosophy, in understanding our world — to not cull information, especially when we have no idea of the full scope of everything that could happen.

This is not intended to supplant any of the other tools we use in technology design work. Personas, journeys, interviews and surveys, workshops and all the models for thinking and parsing our not-us-es still apply. 

Information technology is a useful business tool because it has mass impact. It takes longer to build, with fewer people able to modify it proficiently, and that has a steep cost factor. Its boon is that once the data is encapsulated and the program built, it makes it easier for more people to use it. The reason it benefits a capitalist society is the mass impact: a few people are working hard to encapsulate and share a knowledge. 

Mass impact also means that any bias — cognitive, social, priority, et al — is also spread to the people leveraging it, or managing in a world adjacent to people acting based on decisions baked into our IT. It is a serious responsibility.