Keynote addressed in the A & D Visitors Series, School of Art & Design, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, October 2022.
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.
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So, this is my provocative presentation, and I expect you to stay provoked by the questions I will try to raise during it. Please engage with these questions in the chat box, and after I’m done with this full series of questioning, let’s have an open dialogue. This will take around 30 minutes, and then we’ll see how far we can go with the discussion.
As Carlos Aguiar already introduced me, I am currently a professor of Service Design and Experience Design, and this presentation offers a more critical view of my field, which is definitely not the mainstream perspective on the topic.
Let’s start with the key, fundamental question of this field: is it really possible to design user experience—to design an experience for someone else? Is it possible for someone else’s experience to be designed? Well, most scholars in this field would say it’s not possible, while most practitioners in the industry would say it is indeed possible. I am a scholar, and I believe it is possible. And it’s better to believe it is possible because then we must adopt a critical perspective on it and, especially, take responsibility for it.
How do I teach this to my students? Well, I’ve been conducting several experiments on critical pedagogy in experience design, and this one was my favorite. We slowly ate Sonho de Valsa, which is a very traditional Brazilian candy. Somehow, it led students to remember their childhood experiences of eating this candy. But they had to eat it very slowly, with their eyes closed. They had to smell it, lick it, and separate the different layers of the candy before they finally ate and chewed it. I asked them to wait before they did each of these steps so they could perceive how much information and sensory stimulation was built into this simple product.
After they did this with the candy, I also had them do the same thing with the WhatsApp application on their phones. They were asked to separate into layers the way the interface was designed. They perceived how much knowledge and design expertise had been put into the small, micro details of this interface, and they realized how much of their everyday experience had been intentionally designed. They agreed with my position that, indeed, experiences can be designed.
However, believing that experiences can be designed is not enough. You need to understand how it works to take responsibility for it. I use a model that is quite different from most experience design models out there because it slowly helps students understand that there are places in society divided by class, gender, race, and so on. But first, let’s start with what they already know.
They know that they are targeting a user, and they expect that the user experience will somehow fulfill the wishes or goals—the business goals—of the designers. So, they expect this arrow coming from the users toward the designers. But the designers also have their own experiences, which I call “designer experiences.” I emphasize that designers have the privilege of being recognized as designers, while users are not recognized in the same way.
Students often ask, “Why the hell are you framing things in this way?” It’s because users are indeed designing their own user experiences as well. Like any human being, we are always designing our experiences. However, the authorship of this experience is sometimes not acknowledged because of something broader—something historical—which is oppression.
After we realize how oppression is ingrained in designed experiences, we can start discussing ethics from another perspective—a much more critical perspective. In terms of oppression studies of design, designers represent a privileged social group, which I call “the self,” while users represent an underprivileged social group, which I call “the other.” There are diverse social groups within both the self and the other, but in an oppressive relationship, the self, which is more powerful, has historically won the struggle for predominance.
This dynamic is described by philosopher Georg Hegel and later systematized by thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and others. They argue that the self—the oppressor—tries to oppress the other and makes the other believe they are dependent on the self for living their lives. This also applies to experience design in a broad sense, which must be critically examined and held accountable.
Let’s see how we can unfold this model into certain ethical questions. The first and most obvious question is: is it unethical to design the experiences of the other—to intervene in someone else’s life in this way?
The MK-Ultra project conducted by the CIA during the 60s and 70s clearly shows that it is unethical. People suffered greatly when attempts were made to control their experiences through the use of drugs or media-conditioning methods. The Wormwood documentary on Netflix tells part of this story, which is terrible. It’s probably one of the worst moments in human history in terms of designing experiences.
Still, this is the past of experience design, and we must criticize it and discuss it today because elements of human behavior conditioning are still present in everyday life, albeit in more subtle ways—and they remain unethical. But then, is designing the same as controlling experiences? Some people who look at these social experiments or mind-control experiments might think it’s the same as designing. Well, I wouldn’t say so.
I believe designing is not the same as controlling, and design is definitely not the same as working for the CIA or conducting psychological or social experiments. It’s absolutely not the same because you can design something to be open, to invite interaction, and to allow for open-ended results and interactions.
For example, Bar do Arante, which is a great place in Florianópolis, allows visitors to leave messages attached to the windows, ceilings, or walls. You can write basically anything you want. The designers opened up this possibility, and they definitely cannot control what people write there or what people, especially, will read.
Therefore, I believe design is not the same as control. About that, some designers might think: “Well, if I don’t have control, then I don’t have responsibility for it, right?” Well, my experience of raising a child suggests that we do have responsibility for things we cannot fully control. A child must grow for their own sake, find their own life, and develop in a way that is usually not exactly the way parents might think is perfect or ideal. But still, parents have to ensure that the child is not doing something against the law or something harmful to themselves.
That’s responsibility in a nutshell.
My son—I’m really proud of him. At the age of 13, he even gave a TEDx talk. He developed his ideas autonomously and presented them to an interested audience, saying things he truly believed in. I’m partially responsible for that, but he definitely deserves most of the credit. That’s how we might relate to users: we need to take responsibility, but certainly not full responsibility.
How do we do that? How do we take responsibility for the experiences designed for others? Well, there are several attempts and initiatives underway in the field. For example, Mike Monteiro’s Designer’s Code of Ethics is a great initiative that has attracted a lot of attention. He published this text in 2017 on the Medium website, sparking discussions online and inspiring conferences around the topic. He even published a book on it. But still, I don’t believe this code of ethics is enough.
I believe we need to do much more. Founding or opening design ethics consultancies is also fine, but it’s definitely not enough. Especially if you write a code of ethics and rebrand your design studio as an ethics consultancy—how transparent and detached is that code of ethics? Is it appropriate for one company or individual to be writing the code of ethics? Shouldn’t that task fall to a professional association, like the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) in my field? Where is the code of ethics for interaction design? I don’t know. This discussion should definitely go beyond consultancies and Medium articles.
I believe we can take this conversation to another level by opening non-profit organizations that have fewer commercial interests—or at least have mechanisms for ensuring accountability in their work. This way, we avoid conflicts of interest, like promoting design ethics principles that ultimately serve to sell consultancy services.
The non-profit organization Center for Humane Technology, founded by Tristan Harris—featured in the Netflix documentary about social network biases—is an example of an interesting initiative. It’s better organized than regular consultancy work, but it’s still not enough. We need professional work associations.
In the design field, we don’t have enough of these, especially in my experience design field. In service design, we have some associations, but they are not as advanced as, for example, Alphabet’s worker union. These unions are pushing forward by criticizing how big tech companies fail to ask critical ethical questions. They support employees in raising ethical concerns—even when doing so might result in losing business opportunities that conflict with broader human interests. Trade unions are essential to keep questioning things. Otherwise, big companies, CEOs, and boards of directors will always overpower workers who raise critical voices.
To wrap up with these initiatives. I want to emphasize that the work we are doing in academia, and the work being done by philosophers—who are mostly tax-paid employees, essentially public servants—working for universities that are primarily funded by the government and your taxes, is critical. Without such funding, this kind of work would never happen. Companies that engage in unethical practices are not interested in funding work that holds them accountable, especially by so-called “obscure philosophers.”
An example is Peter-Paul Verbeek, a Dutch philosopher who has deeply inspired my work and sat on my PhD evaluation committee. His contributions are significant because he helped me understand the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, particularly through his book What Things Do (2005). Later, he also explored the relationship between design and morality (2011) and how we can moralize society by designing technology in ethical ways. These two books are marvelous starting points for understanding this topic in a much deeper way than what is typically presented in practice-oriented initiatives.
But still, this is not enough. What is enough is to keep asking these kinds of questions while we moralize our practices. Ethics is not just an old philosophy from Greece that we occasionally remember exists. Ethics is something to be practiced in everyday life. We must ask these questions and seek multiple answers, depending on the situations we face.
Let’s delve into further questions about our practice so I can demonstrate how this applies to our everyday experiences. There are many different design approaches and methods out there, and I’ll focus on one of the most popular in my field: the Design Council’s Double Diamond.
The Double Diamond begins with some very interesting moral principles, such as how to respect other people’s opinions and avoid cutting them out of the process prematurely. It includes a divergent moment where ideas are generated and shared, followed by a convergent moment where they are refined. This structure allows people to express themselves freely. However, like any other method, the Double Diamond can easily fall prey to unethical practices and become a tool for the demoralization of society rather than its moralization.
This happens because people stop questioning the model. They believe it is inherently good and that applying the Double Diamond method guarantees a perfect or ethical outcome. But this is not always the case—and increasingly, it is not the case at all. For example, the Double Diamond is often used to aggregate data collected from “the other” through methods such as data mining or other extractive techniques that do not seek proper permission for collecting data. Even when permission is sought, it is often not done in a way that users fully understand. Furthermore, the data collected is rarely, if ever, returned to the users.
This lack of transparency prevents users from criticizing the representations created using their data. Worse, they may be placed into stereotyped representations that distort their actual experiences. Such distortions can have real consequences, as they place users in unsafe or uncomfortable positions, affecting their lives through designs based on misrepresented data. To scrutinize this further, I want to add an analogy: the Double Diamond can be compared to literal diamond extraction or mining activities.
I would argue that the social impact of the Double Diamond is similar to the environmental impact of diamond mines. Dillon Marsh, an artist, takes pictures of diamond mines, and one of his works is striking because it shows the contrast: to extract a diamond the size of a human fist, you need to remove 400 square meters of land. This land will never return to its original shape—all for such a small, valuable material.
We might be doing something similar with the Double Diamond. If we extend the analogy between minerals and data, we can see that every Double Diamond process leaves behind a “social crater,” so to speak, filled with silenced others who have no stakes in the design process. These are people who might have had their actions tracked by a data collection system without their knowledge or consent. Most of the time, they do not know their data is being collected, and even less often do they have control over how that data is interpreted.
Designers take this data, interpret it, and sometimes act on behalf of users. They position themselves as advocates or representatives within a big tech company or any other organization designing experiences. But the people behind the data—the users—are silenced. They are silenced because designers and companies assume these people didn’t help or contribute meaningfully. These individuals have no stake in the design outcomes, and, in most cases, these silenced users are oppressed people in so many ways like Black people.
There has been progress in incorporating Black designers into user experience (UX) design teams, and that’s great because Black designers can share their perspectives on experience design. But that alone is not enough. We need to question the method that perpetuates this situation. It’s not just a matter of switching who occupies each side of the oppression structure. If we truly want to challenge oppression, we need structural change.
This change starts with genuinely listening to “the other” in design. Participatory design is one of the oldest design approaches committed to truly hearing what users have to say. It requires changing the design based on what people say in their own words, reflecting on their positionalities, and respecting what they bring to the table.
For example, I am showing here a project called Change by Design I joined in 2014, organized by Architects Sans Frontieres. The project aimed to include people who were about to be relocated from their housing to another area in the city. These individuals wanted to express their concerns to City Hall. We helped them synthesize their complaints and later compiled visualizations to reflect the diverse voices of the inhabitants of these condominiums. These people had different perspectives, and we had to ensure that their unique viewpoints were not silenced, even inadvertently.
If what they said was something we found trivial, we still had to represent it in some way. We could not diminish their voices, and we took responsibility for that. Later, we organized a meeting with City Hall representatives, leaders of their association, and some religious representatives to facilitate a debate about the removal and the massive construction project planned nearby.
Sometimes, “the other” was not present, and in those cases, we had to defend their voices against criticism that sought to discredit them. This is very important—designers must take sides with “the other.” But what happens if “the other” says something unethical? This is the plot twist, right?
In Brazil, this situation happens frequently. For example, let’s consider Uber Comfort’s design feature. Passengers and drivers agreed on the option for a “quiet ride,” where the passenger could request silence during the ride. However, the passenger, not the driver, was the one who chose this option. The driver had no say in whether they wanted to drive in silence or not. Moreover, the passenger had to pay extra for this feature as part of the Uber Comfort premium service.
This is unethical because there is no symmetry in power or agency in this functionality. It may be considered moral by societal standards, but it is not ethical. This raises the question: how can designers ethically challenge something that is considered moral by society? The Uber example is just one case.
In Brazil, we have been exploring some methods to raise ethical questions that are deeply artistic. One such method is Theater of the Oppressed, created by Agusto Boal. We adapted the method into what we now call the Theater of the Techno-Oppressed, focusing on people oppressed through technology—in this case, the digital service called Uber Comfort. We held this play in front of an audience of future designers and computer scientists. We asked them: “Do you think this is ethical? Do you think this is moral?” They had to grapple with these definitions: what is morality, what is ethicality, and how do these concepts apply to our situation?
This sparked great conversations, and we began further developing this method. I’ll show you more examples of the Theater of the Techno-Oppressed later on. But this raises another question: how can designers move from ethically solving wicked problems to actively posing wicked problems?
Most current design thinking, experience design, and service design literature and practices claim that some problems cannot be solved entirely. They advocate for finding the most satisfying solution possible—essentially making an ethical choice about what can and cannot be achieved. However, I don’t believe this is a particularly compelling way to approach ethics.
To challenge this perspective, we held another Theater of the Techno-Oppressed play at a conference called Attending to Futures in Germany. It was a remote conference in 2021, and our play, titled Wicked Problems or Wicked Designers?, explored how design thinking sometimes fails to ask deep ethical questions. Instead, it focuses on solving problems superficially without truly understanding them.
For instance, in the play, a designer character attempts to frame the issue of “period dignity” in Brazil, where many women cannot afford sanitary pads, as a “problem” to be solved. The discussion revealed that people themselves are not “problems” to be solved—yet design thinking often treats them as such. This led to another fascinating discussion about the ethical implications of framing and addressing societal issues.
The Theater of the Techno-Oppressed proves to be a powerful way to raise ethical questions related to design practice. But what can we do when we cannot eliminate an unethical functionality—even if we believe it is unethical? What if the company or government we work for insists on it, even threatening consequences if we do not implement it?
One option is to pass the ethical responsibility to the user, though this is not ideal or fully responsible. For example, consider a feature on Twitter. When users attempt to retweet a news item without reading it, Twitter raises a prompt asking them to review the content before sharing. While this raises some awareness and encourages users to pause and reflect, it’s not enough. Twitter is not taking full responsibility for the spread of misinformation, but it is making a minimal effort to raise consciousness about the issue. Still, this approach falls short of what is necessary to address ethical concerns fully.
What if we cannot even change the design content, and we cannot touch the content itself? Well, we can do a lot with aesthetics. Aesthetics alone can already express reality. Céu Brasileiro Memorial is the final work of Humberto Salmazo, a student of mine, who developed an homage to COVID-19 victims using a Twitter bot system. On the left side, you see his first sketch of the screen, which draws visual references from video games—for example, displaying the number of victims on the bottom left side of the screen.
However, as you move to the center of the screen, where typically the number of lives is not shown in video games, this reference is avoided. It no longer suggests these lives to be “unreal,” as they might appear in a game. Despite maintaining an aesthetically pleasing design, he took care not to draw the wrong analogy.
What does ethics have to do with aesthetics? What is the relationship? Behind every aesthetic decision, there is always an implicit ethical dimension—a way of guiding society. This is a very interesting perspective I took from Peter-Paul Verbeek’s book What Things Do (2005). Let me give you a contemporary example: emojis. Emojis allow you to express emotions to others without showing your face, similar to how cannibal masks functioned historically. This is both an ethical and an aesthetic decision. By not fully revealing yourself, you protect yourself with a “mask.” This mask allows you to express emotions more strongly or harshly without feeling as though you are putting yourself on the line. You can always say, “I was just using an emoji; I was just playing a character.”
This is undoubtedly an ethical operation, providing new ways to say things you wouldn’t otherwise say. People choose symbols, icons, and emojis with the same mindset—trying to express something they wouldn’t say without the mask. These aesthetic choices often follow patterns related to class, race, gender, taste, and the social groups I mentioned earlier.
For example, in a study conducted by Barbieri & Camacho-Collados (2018), they found that people tend to use emojis that correspond to their skin tone. This demonstrates how aesthetic choices are deeply tied to social and cultural factors.
As you can see at the top, gender was also quite consistent in these emoji choices. This makes us reflect on how these choices of emojis might reflect a person’s positionality in the world and how they might also reproduce oppressive and exclusionary tastes.
Let me pick another example—Tinder—and how Asian and Black people are disproportionately swiped off the screen, often not matched with White users. This happens not because of purely individual preferences, but because such preferences are shaped by a culture of white supremacy. These are tastes developed within a system where some individuals would never marry, date, or even meet someone of a different race.
Tinder, as a platform, should actively work to prevent this reproduction of structural oppression. If designers have the ability to design otherwise, they should. Otherwise, it becomes anti-ethical. There’s no such thing as neutral aesthetics. Tinder—or any company—cannot claim neutrality while applying “equal” rules to all races and genders if the outcome perpetuates oppression. By doing so, they are being anti-ethical.
As Augusto Boal rightfully point in his Aesthetics of the Oppressed book, aesthetics cannot neutral because the very term “aesthetics” means to stimulate the senses. How can you stimulate the senses in a neutral way? Neutrality means no stimuli.
Let me pick another example, this time from the Brazilian government’s handling of COVID-19 figures. The initial data dashboard designed to track the pandemic featured modern, minimalist, and clean graphics. However, this design attempted to obscure the most striking and essential information: the death rate. The focus was instead placed on the number of people who had recovered from the disease, which the government wanted to emphasize.
At the time of this design, around 700,000 people had died from COVID-19—a staggering number of lives lost to a preventable disease. Yet, the clean, minimalist design of the dashboard downplayed this figure, favoring a more optimistic narrative that aligned with the government’s priorities.
Now compare this with an earlier version of the data dashboard, created by a different minister of health who was openly critical of President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration and later fired. This earlier design emphasized lethality and the death rate as the most important information. The deaths were given the strongest weight and the brightest color in the design.
You can see that this approach is part of a much wider layout strategy that uses vibrant colors and tries to draw more attention to the criticality of these numbers. Someone might call this a “postmodern exuberant and diverse graphics.” However, this example doesn’t fully encapsulate everything I mean by the aesthetics of the oppressed, as it still reflects the minister of health’s effort at the time to highlight the alarming number of deaths. These deaths were disproportionately affecting poor people, Black people, women, and other oppressed groups and this wasn’t expressed at all.
So, is it possible to train the senses to criticize the aesthetics of the oppressor and appreciate the aesthetics of the oppressed? This is definitely something we need to develop in design schools. However, we currently lack substantial references for doing this effectively.
In response, we have organized remote online courses called Designs of the Oppressed since last year through the Design and Oppression Network—a group of researchers and practitioners across Brazil working against oppression on several fronts. This course has been a marvelous experience, and we have another cohort starting next week. If you want to learn more about this topic, please sign up—it’s free!
In one of the exercises last year, we worked on training and retraining our senses by deconstructing and reconstructing the image of a “greenwashed” Coca-Cola bottle. This bottle was marketed as plant-based but still fed people excessive sugar, potentially contributing to health issues. By redesigning this Coke bottle, students learned how to subvert capitalist and oppressive designs and turn them into tools for the benefit of users and organized communities.
This exercise was part of a Theater of the Oppressed game called Homage to Magritte, which we adapted for remote participation in our course. At the Federal University of Technology – Paraná, our Laboratory of Designing Against Oppression holds many face-to-face events. One of our recent projects was an advertising campaign where students created digital collages using Photoshop to combine different popular expressions against oppression into a single, unified visual expression.
Through these exercises, our students are learning to both read and write the aesthetics of the oppressed, moving away from European and U.S. design references that often lack relevance to our own lived contexts. A third approach we use to develop this sensibility is to train students to try something new every day. For example, they might try a new kind of beverage—even one they think they won’t like. The goal is to encourage openness and prevent them from being confined within taste-based social network bubbles.
But what if none of this is possible? What if the degree of freedom to make ethical decisions is next to zero? What if you are being oppressed, or in a warlike situation where ethical decisions are unavailable? In such cases, I’m sorry to say, but you are being treated as a tool, not as a human designer. It might be better to resign than to continue in such conditions and risk being replaced by an artificial intelligence agent.
This issue was central to one of our Theater of the Techno-Oppressed plays, where we explored the automation of design work and its consequences on responsibility. What happens when there are no job posts left for designers, and AI machines have automated everything? While it’s possible to delegate decisions to machines, you cannot delegate responsibility.
As MIT’s Moral Machine experiment convincingly shows, when you select certain options for an AI-controlled car, you are not delegating morality to the machine—you are reproducing the morality of the social group you belong to. This means the social group, along with the designer, is responsible for the actions of the machine.
Designers are hired precisely to take responsibility for the ethical and aesthetic decisions delegated to things. Ethics and aesthetics are not merely matters of design thinking—which I am critically examining here—but are integral to what I call designing consciousness. Designing consciousness goes beyond the frameworks of design thinking to incorporate ethics and aesthetics at its core. I believe there is much research and practice yet to be developed in this direction, moving from matters of design thinking to matters of designing consciousness.
I hope I’ve provoked your thoughts with this presentation. What will you do about these issues? First, I want to thank you for your attention and invite you to explore the references I’ve shared. I look forward to an engaging debate on this topic—please join us.
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.
Boal, A. (2006). The aesthetics of the oppressed. Routledge.
