[IxDA Discuss] Ethical Issues for Interaction Designers

[Frederick van Amstel]

> this.) And certainly context is important. But I am guessing that
> there are certain behaviors that will nearly always be inappropriate
> and not to be designed into a system, and that is where our judgement
> should come in. If I designed an email client that made it
> ridiculously easy to spam everyone with an email address, I'm pretty
> certain people would be up in arms. Of course, most ethical dilemmas
> aren't so cut and dried...

I wouldn't say allways, but there are some macro-contexts that
designers as well as users are aware of, like the Internet as a
communication medium. Everybody on the Internet is concerned with
spam, so your example sounds right. But, consider if we take a
micro-context like communication activities between mutual contacts in
a social-network. Some people will consider acceptable sending to all
your contacts an announcement of the next party you're organizing on,
some won't. If there are no moderating rules from the system, it's
likely that some social protocol would arise and people who don't
respect it would be criticized or excluded from the conversation, like
in the real world. Interaction designers should give tools for people
to mantain or change social norms (like a contact block feature), not
to try to enforce them.


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.{ Frederick van Amstel }. Curitiba ´´ PR
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