Take Note, Facebook: How Colleges Are Training
Designers To Treat Users Like More Than Lab Rats
STUDENTS
AT MIT, STANFORD, AND ELSEWHERE ARE LEARNING TO BUILD TECHNOLOGY
PRODUCTS WITH USER WELL-BEING IN MIND.
Facebook
sparked
outrage
this
summer when it published results of a study conducted
on unwitting users.
The study looked at whether people who were shown more positive or
negative words in friends' posts would write more positive or
negative words themselves, apparently without considering the ethics
of manipulating users' emotions. (Indeed, users
shown
more negative words were more negative in their posts and vice
versa.) “Was this designed to create maximum benefits for the end
user? I can’t really see that anywhere in that research,” says
Marc
Smith,
a sociologist who spent 10 years as a researcher at Microsoft. “Where
is it saying, 'This is how we will now deal with people who are
borderline depressed, we’re going to start steering them toward
happier stuff?'”
The
study highlighted one of the tech industry's uglier secrets:
Companies like Netflix, Facebook, and Google
have
tremendous power to influence users' behavior, but little incentive
to wield that power ethically. These companies can encourage
seemingly positive behavior, like voting,
getting
to know prospective partners,
and reporting bullies.
But what happens when users' welfare conflicts with that of a
company? There is no system in place to protect the user. A handful
of classes at universities are attempting to prepare tomorrow’s
designers to make decisions that consider user well-being first.
Sophia Brueckner, a research assistant at MIT Media Lab, developed a new type of ethics class for technology inventors after working at Google, where even the smallest change to a product could impact tens of millions of people instantly. “I realized I could make people really happy or sad or, if you think about neuroplasticity, it’s actually changing the way the neurons in our brains work,” she says. “It made me feel very humble.”
The
class, which she taught at the RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN
and
the MIT Media Lab, attempted to teach a sense of responsibility to
technology
inventors
through science fiction, a genre in which writers have been thinking
deeply about the impact of today’s technologies for decades. “It
encourages people to have that long-term version that I think is
missing in the world of innovation right now,” she says, “What
happens when your idea scales to millions of people? What happens
when people are using your product hundreds of times a day? I think
the people who are developing new technologies need to be thinking
about that.”
Students
in Brueckner’s class built functional properties of technologies
depicted by science fiction texts. One group created a “sensory
fiction”
book
and wearable gadget that, in addition to adding lights and sounds to
a story, constricts the body through air pressure bags, changing
temperature and vibrating “to influence the heart” depending on
how the narrative's protagonist feels. Another group was inspired by
a dating technology in Dave Eggers’s The
Circle that
uses information scraped from the Internet about a date to give
suggestions about how to impress him or her. They created an
interactive website about a friend using his public information to
see how he would react to the idea. A third group imagined how a
material that could transition from liquid to solid on command like
the killing material “ice-nine” from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s
Cradle could
be used as a prototyping tool.
It’s
impossible to predict exactly what impact a technology will have on
individuals or on society while you’re designing it. The invention
of the car resulted in an increase in teenage pregnancy. “I’m
sure Mr. Ford did not think, ‘I know, this is a technology for
making more Americans,’” Smith, the sociologist, says. Still,
Brueckner argues, studying science fiction can help technology
creators
understand
that their decisions will have long-term impacts, even if they might
not be able to predict exactly what they are. "You realize that
small decisions can have a vast impact on a lot of people in the
future, and that it’s important to be thoughtful about what you’re
creating.”
Standford’s
Calming
Technology Lab
Neema Moraveji, the founding director of Standford’s Calming Technology Lab and a cofounder of breath-tracking company Spire, has a different approach for teaching students to consider the human impact of what they are designing. His classes teach students to create technology that actively promotes a calm or focused state of mind, and he co-authored a paper that laid out several suggestions for technology designers, including:
- Letting users control or temporarily disable interruptions, the way that TweetDeck allows users to control from whom to receive notifications on Twitter.
- Avoiding overload through the number of features available and the way information is presented. For instance, a Twitter app that opens to the least-recent tweet, “gives users the sense that they must read through all the tweets before they are done.”
- Using a human tone or humor
- Providing positive feedback such as “Thanks for filling out the form” and “You successfully updated the application” in addition to error alerts
- Including easy ways to interact socially, such as Likes and Retweets, which allow people to interact without worrying about how they appear to others.
- Avoiding time pressure when not necessary.
- Incorporating natural elements like “soothing error tones, naturalistic animations, and desktop wallpapers taken from the natural world.”
The
lab has worked on projects like a “calming email client” that
rewards you for good behavior, a “personal peace firewall,”
and a text message-based system for encouraging people to “smile at
each other through their cellphones.” Students have proposed apps
for tracking
sleep,
teaching asthematics breathing
techniques dealing
with an attack,
eating mindfully, and keeping
in touch with loved ones.
Classes
Further Afield
Though
Stanford
has
the only calming technology lab I could find, many other schools have
found ways to step outside traditional ethics classes for design and
engineering students. The University
of California, Berkeley’s
Chemical Enginering Department
also
offers a science
fiction course.
MIT teaches amemoir and technology course. Both of those schools, as
well as Harvard
University,
Cornell
University,
the University
of Michigan,
and the University
of Wisconsin-Madison have
programs in the quickly growing field of Science and Technology
Studies (STS), which looks at science and technology in social,
political, and cultural contexts and often include courses focused on
ethical design.
What
About Today's Tech Inventors?
It's great, you might say, that university students are considering the long-term impact of new technology through lenses like science fiction, but it still leaves the problem of convincing technology companies that make the products we use to move user well-being up the priority list.
Throughout
history, the invention of dangerous
technologies has
been followed by mandated
mitigating technologies that
make them less dangerous. The death machine that is the automobile,
for instance, eventually got seatbelts and airbags, and office
buildings that are difficult to evacuate during a fire go sprinkler
systems.
Firstinsurance companies
required them, then the law did. Smith imagines today's technology
following a similar trajectory. But he doesn’t imagine this
happening any time soon. “It took decades to go from automobile to
seatbelt,” he says. “It took 150 years to go from steam engine to
‘not death machine.’ Technologies emerge, and over time, they are
domesticated.”
Moraveji
argues that it's actually in companies' best interests to consider
the well-being of users first. “Attention is a fragile domain and
people can get very annoyed very quickly unless the value generated
by the product is high enough to withstand the annoyance factor,”
he explained in a Fast
Company Live
Chat.
“From a user's perspective, in a world where everybody is trying to
get our attention, there is an opportunity for a new positive
association created with a product that not only creates value but
cares about my state of mind and makes me feel taken care of (instead
of only making me feel worried, anxious, overwhelmed, and generally
frazzled).”
There
are plenty of examples where company interests and user interests
align. Another Facebook study, the New York Times
reported
earlier this month, aims to make its users nicer by, for instance,
tweaking tools that allow a teenager who wants a post removed to
communicate his or her feelings to its author. Creating a place where
teenagers feel more empathetic is better for both Facebook, which
wants them to stick around, and for teenagers, who don’t want to be
bullied.
But
there are also plenty of situations in which what is good for a
company can be destructive for a user. Staying on Facebook for a
longer time is good for Facebook, but is it good for users? Infinite
scroll keeps you on a page longer, but it can also feel overwhelming.
Facebook can increase voter turnout with a few tweaks to its
algorithm, but is it pushing users toward a certain political party
in the process? If it does, is that okay? These are the sorts of
dilemmas that some universities are hoping to prepare their students
to address.
For
now, there are products like Spire, for which Moraveji recently took
a leave of absence from Standford to co-create. The gadget, a breath
monitor that clips to a pants waistband or bra, alerts uses when they
are getting tense and suggests quick activities like breath exercises
they can use to regain focus or calm. It’s like a seatbelt for the
whole Internet—no participation from companies like Facebook or
Google required.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3037292/teaching-tomorrows-designers-to-think-of-users-as-more-than-lab-rats?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-manual-newsletter&position=anjali&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=11102014
No comments:
Post a Comment