Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | E | Ethics and Information Technology

Ethical issues in interaction design.

Article Excerpt
Abstract. When we design information technology we risk building specific metaphors and models of human activities into the technology itself and into the embodied activities, work practices, organisational cultures and social identities of those who use it. This paper is motivated by the recognition that the assumptions about human activity used to guide the design of particular technology are made active, in use, by the interaction design of that technology. A fragment of shared design work is used to ground an exploration of different solutions to one of the technical problems that arise when technology is used to support similar work over distance. The argument is made that some solutions to design problems are better than others because they enable human interaction in different ways. Some solutions enhance the possibilities for human agency, others diminish it. This means that there can be a moral basis for choosing between alternative interaction design decisions that might otherwise be considered equivalent in terms of the functionality and usability of the technology.

Key words: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, human-computer interaction, shared drawing applications, technology design practices, usability

Introduction

But now what matters most is not to perpetuate or bring about a particular image of man (sic), but first of all act to keep open the horizon of possibilities

Hans Jonas (1984) The Imperative of Responsibility. p. 140. Original emphasis

I wasn't thinking about the social representations I was creating as constitutive of the world in which I would have to live.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996) The End Of Capitalism (as we knew it). p. ix

Any technology designed for use in human activities incorporates assumptions about how it will be used. These assumptions, whether explicitly represented in the design process or not, are essential resources that designers exploit to shape their developing designs into specific products. Here, my interest is in the ways that assumptions about human activities are represented in the practices of information and communications technology (ICT) design, where those assumptions come from and how they shape the options for future use of the technology. This interest stems from the insight that our ability to think about any design problem, and the quality of our thinking, depend to a large extent on the appropriateness of the representational resources that we can use in our thinking (Suchman 1994, p. 1).

In the working environments of technology design the term interaction design names an emerging area of research and practice. The authors of a major text in the field explain its focus as: "designing interactive products to support people in their everyday and working lives. In particular, it is about creating user experiences that enhance and extend the way people work, communicate and interact" (Preece et al. 2002, p. 6). I am using interaction design in this context to refer to the design of the actions, and the ways these can be combined with other actions, that are potentially available to people when they are using ICTs to support, mediate and/or enable their activities in some way. Some relevant design issues include: the constraints that shape people's actions in relation to the technology they use, how these actions can be achieved in practice, how they fit into and structure the ongoing interaction, what overheads and benefits can specific actions contribute to the overall interaction and what effects can be produced.

The technology that especially interests me here has been made possible by the use of communications technology to link computer systems to support, enable or otherwise mediate cooperative activities between a group of people who may or may not be working in a shared physical space. In technology design environments this kind of technology is qualified by the acronym CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work). CSCW technology enables people in different places to share the same computer files, either at the same time or at different times, and to exchange any other kind of information that can be represented digitally including audio and visual information. Electronic mail has so far been the most successful application of CSCW technology. But there are many others including teleconferencing and chat groups, virtual worlds, systems designed to control workflow within groups and a range of applications that use audio and video channels to support basic social browsing of distant workplaces. Central to this paper are those that provide a shared workspace where some of the actions of individual participants and the developing work of the group can be represented. More recently, the rapid growth of the world wide web means that interactive web applications are becoming available that offer different kinds of services to participants in cooperative activities that are no longer just work defined. Some of these cooperative technologies have been analysed by those concerned with ethical issues such as surveillance and privacy (e.g., Kling 1996; Spinello 2000; Introna 2001; Clarke 2001), and, particularly relevant for my concerns here, the role that specific technologies play in the production and shaping of social identities (e.g., Suchman 1993; Cocking and Matthews 2000; Cerqui 2002).

This paper is motivated by the recognition that the assumptions about human activity used to guide the design of particular technology are made active, in use, by the interaction design of that technology. When we design information technology we risk building specific metaphors and models of human activities into the technology itself and into the embodied activities, work practices, organisational cultures and social identities of those who use it. In turn, when people are required to act according to the prescribed behaviour of particular representations of human activity then there are questions to ask about whether some of these representations and their associated options for action are better or worse than others. Since ethics is concerned with action, these are ethical questions. These are important questions because how they are answered determines what actions specific technology can, or can not, support in practice. They are urgent questions because as ICTs are increasingly designed and used to mediate the behaviour of particular people, then the technologies themselves increasingly assume ethical significance because of the role they play in shaping how it is possible for people to be when they use technology, and the agency they can create use, both in their work and their interactions with others.

This paper is written from within human-centred technology design traditions where it is an established practice to insist that technology design is informed by an understanding of the practices of those who might use the new technology. By the term human-centred design I describe a commitment to technology design research, methods and approaches that prioritises the agency and quality of experience of those who use the technology. Human-centred approaches are motivated by a commitment to the usability and usefulness of technology on the one hand and user-participation in technology design and implementation on the other. They offer another perspective to technology design than the more dominant technology-driven or management-driven perspectives. Human-centred design has a long history in technology design through areas of design practice such...