Critical and Ethical Design From Theory to Practice
Throughout the years we have become more and more dependent on technology, and with great power comes great.. you know, responsibility. Jokes aside, we believe that we as product people need to have methods and ways of working to highlight and evaluate potential future risks with the decisions we make around our product.
The 14th of November me and Jens hosted a workshop at the Stockholm Xperience Conference with the theme Critical Design from Theory to Practice. Where we tried to take a stab at translating the field of Critical Design to tangible methods within modern product development.
Thanks to everyone joining the workshop and we hope you at least got some inspiration to keep on challening product decisions, add unexpected perspectives and evaluating longterm risks and outcomes. Not only from an individual perspective, but also what impact it might have in society and maybe also for the planet.
I often say it is hard to translate frameworks and guidelines, because it all depends on the field you work in, how mature your organisation is as well as what roles and what structure you have. There are so many parameters which dictates what might have the best effect where you work.
But we hope we can assist you with some flexible assets where you can pick and choose as well as adapt, so it can give the expected result you’re looking for and need.
For methodologies within Critical design the main outcome is NOT solutions, you have come far only by making people discussing things from angles they might never even have thought about before. It might sound like it wont be valuable to spend time on, but in the end I think it will result in being more mindful around decision making which might have great impact longterm for your users and the society.
Things you can do right now
Here are some things you can do, which is very little effort but still opens up for discussions.
Add one Critical Persona to your personas/archetypes/target groups
Add one Critical question where you let your respondents reason about future risk and outcomes related to what you’re investigating
Add one Critical Perspective to your Crazy 8 session
Add one Critical Scenario to your discovery work or prototype testing
Add one metric to your KPI's or OKR's which relates to more ethical outcomes
It does not have to change the way you work, you can just add small activities that might make a big change in the long run.
Assets
Google Drive folder with assets
The folder contains Keynote slides in pdf format
Workshop templates
Current states: 1 template per theme
Design Fiction with What If statement: 6 different ones per theme
Impact: 1 template per theme
