This is a provocative talk on design ethics that might spark a debate with the audience. The presenter will show well-known design products and processes that promise to deliver unique experiences. His critique of these examples will uncover ethical questions related to oppression. Being a designer, is it ethical to design an experience for another human being? To what extent do we impose the aesthetic taste of our class, gender, race, or nation through our designed experiences? Can we design outside of taste regimes? How can we design against oppression and in favor of liberation? The experiences designed by the Design & Oppression Network will also be presented as a counterpoint.

1. Ethics and aesthetics of the
experience designed for the Other
Frederick van Amstel @fredvanamstel
Laboratory of Design against Oppression (LADO), UTFPR
www.fredvanamstel.com

2. Is it possible to design
user experiences?

3. The experiments I conducted with my students say yes.

4. How does it work?

5. DESIGNERS
People whose designs
are recognized as
designs
USERS
People whose designs
are NOT recognized as
designs
Designer experience
User experience

6. SELF
Privileged social
groups (Global North,
Men, White, rich,
able…)
OTHER
Underprivileged
social groups
(Global South,
Women, Black, poor,
disabled…)
Designer experience
User experience

7. Is it anti-ethical to design
the experience of the Other?

8. MKUltra experiments conducted by the CIA suggest so.
Wormwood documentary (2017).

9. Is it designing the same as
controlling the experience?

10. Bar do Arante in Florianópolis is an example that it is
possible to design an experience without controlling it.

11. Are designers responsible for
designed experiences, if they do
not have control over them?

12. My experience of raising a child suggests so.

13. How to take responsibility
for the experience designed
for the Other?

14. Writing and debating codes of ethics is fine, but it is not
enough.

15. Design ethics consultancies are fine, but they are not
enough.

16. Founding a non-profit organization to promote design ethics
is good, but it is not enough.

17. Founding labor unions to defend ethical workers is very
good, but it is not enough.

18. Paying taxes to fund academic research on design ethics is
also very good, but it is not enough.
Ethics Morality

19. Enough is to keep
asking these kinds of
questions while we
moralize our practices.

20. Even if design processes start from moral principles, they
easily fall into immoral practices.

21. The Double Diamond is often used to aggregate data
collected from the Other through data mining or any other
extractive method.

22. The social impact of the Double Diamond is similar to the
environmental impact of diamond mines (Dillon Marsh, 2015).

23. Every Double Diamond process leaves behind a "social
crater" of silenced Others, with no stakes in design.

24. How to truly listen
the Other in design?

25. The Other feel being heard when there is a Participatory
Design commitment (Frediani et al., 2014).

26. The synthesis of multiple voices needs to be very careful not
to silence or diminish any voice.

27. Designers need to defend the voice of the Other when the
Other is not present.

28. What if the Other says
something anti-ethical?

29. In Brazil, passengers and drivers agree on the option to ride
in silence in Uber Comfort. This is unethical because the
driver cannot express his preferences in the same way.

30. How can designers
ethically question
something that is
considered moral by
society?

31. Theater of the Techno-Oppressed raise ethical questions
through acting and debating (Gonzatto & Van Amstel, 2017).

32. How can designers move from
ethically solving wicked
problems to ethically posing
wicked problems?

33. Wicked Problems, Wicked Designs (2021) is a theater play
on designing for period dignity (Saito et al., 2022).

34. What can we do when we cannot
eliminate unethical functionality?

35. We can pass on the ethical questioning to the Other,
although this is not so responsible.

36. What if we cannot even
change design content?

37. Aesthetics alone can already express morality
(Salmazo, 2021).

38. What does ethics has to do
with aesthetics?

39. Behind every aesthetic, there is implicit ethics, that is, a
way of living in society (Verbeek, 2005). For example,
animojis allow you to express emotions to the Other
without showing your face, just like carnival masks.

40. The aesthetic choices of emojis also follow class, race, and
gender tastes (Barbieri & Camacho-Collados, 2018).

41. Prioritizing the aesthetic tastes of privileged groups often
harms underprivileged groups.

42. Neutral aesthetics is
not really neutral.

43. Modern, minimalist and clean graphics are some of the
common features of the aesthetics of the oppressor.

44. Postmodern, exuberant and diverse graphics are some of the
common features of the aesthetics of the oppressed.

45. Is it possible to train the senses
to criticize the aesthetics of the
oppressor and appreciate the
aesthetics of the oppressed?

46. The Design & Oppression network offers a Designs of the
Oppressed online course about that.

47. In 2021, we played Homage to Magritte dramatic game
(Boal, 2005): What if this coke bottle wasn’t a coke bottle?

48. In the Laboratory of Design against Oppression (LADO), we
learn to read and write the aesthetics of the oppressed.

49. In LADO pedagogical experiences, we train students to taste
something new every day.

50. What if none of this is
possible? What if the degree of
freedom to take ethical
decisions is next to zero? What
if you are being oppressed to
oppress the Other?

51. When there are no ethical decisions left to be taken, you are
being treated as a tool, not as a human. Better resign soon
than wait to be replaced by an A.I.

52. What if there are no remaining
job posts for designers?

53. You can delegate decisions to machines, but you cannot
delegate responsibility for these (MIT’s Moral Machine).

54. Designers are hired precisely
for that: to take responsibility
for the ethical and aesthetic
decisions delegated to Things.

55. Ethics and aesthetics is not just
a matter of design thinking.
It is a matter of design
consciousness.

56. What do you do about this?

57. References
Barbieri, F., & Camacho-Collados, J. (2018, June). How gender and skin tone modifiers affect emoji semantics in
Twitter. In Proceedings of the Seventh Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (pp. 101-106).
Frediani et al. (2014). Change by Design London: Collective imaginations for contested sites in Euston. Available
at: https://issuu.com/asf-uk/docs/cbd_london_report_
Monteiro, M. (2017). A Designer's Code of Ethics. https://deardesignstudent.com/a-designers-code-of-ethics-
f4a88aca9e95
Verbeek, P. P. (2005). What things do. Penn State University Press.
Verbeek, P. P. (2011). Moralizing technology: Understanding and designing the morality of things. University of
Chicago press.
Marsh, D. (2015) For What It's Worth: Diamonds. http://dillonmarsh.com/diamonds.html
Gonzatto, R. F., & Van Amstel, F. M. (2017, October). Designing oppressive and libertarian interactions with the
conscious body. In Proceedings of the XVI Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp.
1-10).
Saito, C., Serpa, B.O., Angelon, R., and van Amstel, F. (2022) Coming to terms with design wickedness:
Reflections from a forum theatre on design thinking, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J.,
Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June – 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.668
Salmazo, Humberto William. (2021) Memorial Céu Brasileiro Bot: design gráfico, arte generativa, visualização de
dados e automação no Twitter. Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso (Tecnologia em Design Gráfico) – Universidade
Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, 2021.
Boal, A. (2005). Games for actors and non-actors. Routledge.

58. Thank you!
Frederick van Amstel @fredvanamstel
Laboratory of Design against Oppression (LADO), UTFPR
www.fredvanamstel.com