Morality and User Interface Design
An interesting article about the relationship of morality and user interface design ...
"Morality and User Interface Design are two topics that do not seem too closely related at first glance. After all, interface design is about “nice” and usable interfaces, but we as Usability Engineers and User Interface Designers don’t have to make decisions that have any severe impact on the morality side, right? – Well, how you design a user interface for a mobile phone may not be something Immanuel Kant would have bothered himself with, were he alive today. But what about such things as, e.g., user interfaces for weapon control?
M.L. Cummings at MIT wrote an interesting article on “Creating Moral Buffers in Weapon Control Interface Design” [PDF] in which she takes a look at military and also medical settings and describes the moral implications that decisions in those areas of interface design inevitably have.
The basic argument she makes is, that a user interface can create a “gap” between a person’s actions and their consequences which results in psychological/emotional (and in some cases also physical) distancing from those consequences and therefore in a diminished sense of accountability and responsibility: the moral buffer.
In addition, users have a tendency to anthropomorphise computers. (Those of you who ever yelled at their computer when it didn’t do what it was intended to do will know what she is talking about.) This, together with the cognitive limitations a stressful situation can produce and the moral buffer described above, can even lead to users assigning moral authority to computers in certain situations. This may seem rather theoretical – as long as you are not a patient in a hospital where staff relies on a system like APACHE, which determines “at what stage of a terminal illness treatment would be futile." continued ... (Via Another Useful Blog)
"Morality and User Interface Design are two topics that do not seem too closely related at first glance. After all, interface design is about “nice” and usable interfaces, but we as Usability Engineers and User Interface Designers don’t have to make decisions that have any severe impact on the morality side, right? – Well, how you design a user interface for a mobile phone may not be something Immanuel Kant would have bothered himself with, were he alive today. But what about such things as, e.g., user interfaces for weapon control?
M.L. Cummings at MIT wrote an interesting article on “Creating Moral Buffers in Weapon Control Interface Design” [PDF] in which she takes a look at military and also medical settings and describes the moral implications that decisions in those areas of interface design inevitably have.
The basic argument she makes is, that a user interface can create a “gap” between a person’s actions and their consequences which results in psychological/emotional (and in some cases also physical) distancing from those consequences and therefore in a diminished sense of accountability and responsibility: the moral buffer.
In addition, users have a tendency to anthropomorphise computers. (Those of you who ever yelled at their computer when it didn’t do what it was intended to do will know what she is talking about.) This, together with the cognitive limitations a stressful situation can produce and the moral buffer described above, can even lead to users assigning moral authority to computers in certain situations. This may seem rather theoretical – as long as you are not a patient in a hospital where staff relies on a system like APACHE, which determines “at what stage of a terminal illness treatment would be futile." continued ... (Via Another Useful Blog)
Morality.
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