What does it mean to be successful in design? What is our definition of success?
The primary focus of most designers involved in ethical design has been to promote the field through thoughtful discussions, articles, toolkits, frameworks, etc. But if we look at business from a systems-thinking point of view, this is not the right level of influence. Even if we are successful in the aforementioned activities – improving design on a micro level – our good intentions come undone by business incentives that reward scale, ever-more engagement, and efficiency.
This is nobody’s fault, but simply the system we’re in: under business-as-usual, it makes “business sense” to hijack people’s attention, facilitate the flow of money into the hands of the 1%, and sacrifice Nature to safeguard productivity.
Instead, what would we need to do to integrate ethics structurally into our processes, methods, and tools – what I call “daily ethical design”?
First, we need to redefine what success means – for every design project we do. All the rest comes later. In this talk, I will share the lessons I learned in the past years from trying to redefine design success in practice – e.g. managing a bottom-up change initiative, doing experiments in client projects, and structurally implementing responsibility in the processes of the product company I work for.
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Lennart Overkamp
Lennart Overkamp currently works as Design Lead at Covantis, a B2B, agri-tech company that’s building a platform that aims to make agriculture trade more efficient, digital, and transparent. He has experience in user research and testing, service design, interaction design, and UX design. He has been researching, writing, and giving presentations and workshops about design ethics since the end of 2018. Some examples include publications at A List Apart, and a year-long internal, bottom-up change management project at his previous company (Cognizant) to structurally implement purpose-driven objectives, metrics, and methods into sales, consultancy, design, and development.
