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I was following Clay Shirky’s Twitter feed the other day and I noticed him talking about the first Android (Google) phone, the G1. I am definitely not a phone aficionado (it’s not like I leave the vicinity of my computer very often) but he said something that caught my attention:

Now, this may not sound revolutionary (and, truth is, it is not), it’s just really uncommon among cell phones. Most phones today will play music, but you have to go through a bunch of hoops which are fiendishly designed to separate you from your money.

For instance, you might be limited to purchasing music as DRM’ed tracks from an online service. If you’re lucky you can buy a special cable with software that locks your music to your phone in some horrible proprietary file type (wouldn’t want you to share it with anyone for free, you see). There are many more techniques like this; probably as many as there are cell phone models.

And that’s my point. What grinds my gears is that customers buy these phones expecting them to work logically—like the G1—and they simply don’t. By design.

If you sell me a phone that plays music, I should be able to get my own music on there. (And I shouldn’t need to pay a dime to do it!) Moreover, why do I need to install some proprietary software just to copy a few files to my device? MP3 players, particularly the iPod, I’m looking at you, too.

I’ve known several people that have purchased phones specifically because they are advertised to play music and have come away disappointed because there’s always an unexpected price tag attached. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s somewhat unethical.

I’m not against making money through services. What I am against is using services as a high-tech form of bait and switch.

This is another instance where I think being ethical could pay off. When everyone else is busy finding ways to lock customers out of their own media, Android seems to have the right idea. If that is the case, I hope word gets around and the platform takes off. I know a lot of people who would like to ditch their MP3 players (which are often locked down, as well) and consolidate as much as they can to one open device.

All this week we’ve been beginning to justify our position re: why design ethics are a good idea. I wrote on Tuesday that it’s reasonable, given a limited model of business transactions, to believe that poor ethics are advantageous. Yesterday, Paul wisely pointed out that with longer-term thinking, the smarter play is to be good. That’s where I’d like to start out today: pondering the ethics of the long game.

I can think of at least one way that design ethics can help a company succeed. It’s a simple idea, but one that I think builds upon many of the points we’ve brought up over the last few weeks here on BlogLESS.

The idea comes from an old Mark Twain quote:

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

To wit: being unethical takes more effort to maintain than being ethical. If you do something unethical, you have to watch your back, keep spinning the web of lies, and make sure that no one finds out. This takes resources away from your business: coordination, control, money, time, lawyers, etc. Of course, if someone does find out (and these days, it’s a good bet they will), the price climbs even more.

All those resources allocated to sustaining unethical behavior would be better spent making the core business better. To dust off an old chestnut: don’t sell the sizzle from a rotten steak. Invest in making a better steak and it sells itself.

In the long term, focusing on your core competency is going to pay off more than making something up or doing something underhanded.

Yesterday, Nick introduced us to a classic problem of game theory: the Prisoner’s Dilemma. A standard PD goes something like this:

Two suspects are arrested by the police, who, having insufficient evidence for a conviction, separate the prisoners and offer each of them a deal: If one testifies against the other (who remains silent) the first goes free while the second receives a 10-year sentence. If both refuse to testify, both receive a six month sentence. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. No prisoner can know what choice the other has made before the end of the investigation.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma, he noted, often provides grist for the dominant argument here in late capitalism that any rational player in an economic game should act unethically. This is because, in the form of a single PD game, a self-interested player (who wants the least possible amount of jail time) will always do better for himself by ratting out his partner.

For example, let’s say you are Prisoner A, and your accomplice Prisoner B can make the following choices: stay silent or betray you. Assume B is silent: If you also stay silent, you get a 6-month sentence; if you betray your pal you get no jail time at all. A self-interested agent, here, should betray. Now assume B betrays you: If you stay silent, you get a ten year sentence, and if you betray him, you get a five year sentence. Again, you should betray. Betraying is thus what game theoreticians call a strictly dominant strategy.

So far so bad, clearly, for the advocate of adopting an ethical stance in business. However, the picture is not so clear in the real world. Why? Well, for one thing, the world of business does not involve a single isolated economic exchange. If it is a prisoner’s dilemma at all, it is a continuously iterated one, for which it is not clear at all that such a strategy is optimal.

However, it seems to me much more likely that real-world business exchange takes the form of a stag hunt. “What’s a stag hunt?” you ask. Well, it’s another kind of game:

Two individuals go out on a hunt. Each can individually choose to hunt a stag or hunt a hare. Each player must choose an action without knowing the choice of the other. If an individual hunts a stag, he must have the cooperation of his partner in order to succeed. An individual can get a hare by himself, but a hare is worth much less than a stag.

This differs from a prisoner’s dilemma in that in the PD, if two people cooperate, each is choosing less rather than more (which is irrational). In the stag hunt, what is rational for one player to choose depends on his beliefs about what the other will choose.

Detail from Tea with Stag by Jana Paleckova.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously (and informally) argued that those who view individual economic exchanges as instances of the prisoner’s dilemma not playing the relevant game, which is fundamentally due to their shortsightedness (their failure, I might note, to take the future into account).

Hobbes’ point is this: Suppose that the probability that the prisoner’s dilemma will be repeated another time is constant. Now suppose that an economic player – mistaking the continuously iterated games of business as discrete – always chooses to defect. Assume further that the other players, on observing this behavior, will retaliate (go, tit for tat).

Here is an example payoff matrix for a PD-type economic exchange (assume you are the red player):

We can see that the smart play here is to always defect: it will always net you one point more than cooperating. But now let’s assume that after any given game, the probability of another game is 0.6. This turns a two-person PD into a two-person stag hunt:

In other words, over indefinitely many games, the always-defect strategy (or, as Nick has it, the unethical play) is actually going to be consistently worse from a purely self-interested perspective.

We last left our discussion on design ethics with the conjecture that designers should take into account the consequences of their actions. This week, I’d like to tackle the question: "why bother?"

That may sound flippant, but it’s a serious inquiry. If we’re going to address this topic fully, we need a serious examination of our reasons for doing so. We ought to have a better answer than the legal ramifications of getting caught or moral appeals to “just because”.

Ethics, by their very definition, are supposed to be good. In a perfect world, that should be all the convincing we need. However, there’s a reason why we study ethics: not playing fair is often advantageous. In fact, being ethical might result in lower profits or losing a job.

What we need is an objective look at costs and benefits of ethics. That’s our theme for this week.

Goin’ on a Prison Break

Rather than try to come up with some kind of taxonomy for ethical and unethical design activities, I want to start by talking in the abstract –focusing only on the consequences of good choices and bad choices— with a thought experiment called The Prisoner’s Dilemma.

If you’re not familiar with it, Wikipedia’s got your back:

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal.

• If one testifies (“defects”) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence.
• If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge.
• If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence.

Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

Granted, it’s a simplistic representation, but nonetheless, I believe it illustrates the conventional ethical conflict well:

1. There is a higher payoff for unethical behavior. If you rat out your partner and he stays quiet, you get the best outcome: no jail time.
2. If you trust your partner, and he turns you in, you stand to lose the most out of any option. We tend to think that doing the wrong thing is risky, but it turns out that being good is the biggest gamble.
3. If you defect, the worst that can happen is that you get 5 years. As such, defecting is the safest position.

In general, if we assume that everyone out there is good (or at least playing by the rules), there is considerable incentive to do bad. If our objective is to make design ethics normative, this is part of what we’re up against.

What Next?

Ideally, everyone would do the right thing. The Prisoner’s Dilemma teaches us that cooperating is risky, but it guarantees a reasonably good outcome for everyone involved. So we might consider that a goal.

I’d like to entertain another proposal, however. Perhaps we can change the rules of the game. In a field of less than reputable players, can we make ethics a winning advantage?

Stay tuned.

Last week, we talked about two types of theories which we could potentially use to evaluate the ethical qualities of a designed object. Consequentialist theories, we said, are more ends-focused: a design fails to be ethical if it has unethical consequences, even if those consequences weren’t predicted by the designer. Deontological theories, on the other hand, say that since the design decisions are morally fallible, we have to grade ethical content based largely on a designers’ intentions.

Milton Glaser most famously designed this "I Love New York" logo.

This discussion is part of a larger attempt to slog our way toward a stance about design ethics. We want to do this because we think design ethics are important, and this week, we’re going to focus on exactly why they’re important. Particularly, Nick is going to start developing that project on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.

While he does that, I plan to start introducing some of the canonical texts in the history of design ethics, under the snappy new tag of the DLB Design Ethics Compendium. The idea of the Compendium is that we’ll be able to use some of what other great designers have written to either support or argue against whatever systematic positions we arrive at. I’ll start that today, with Milton Glaser‘s The Road to Hell.

The Road to Hell

By: Milton Glaser
August/September 2002
Reprinted from Metropolis Magazine, among other places.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of illustrating Dante’s Purgatory for an Italian publisher. I was impressed by the fact that the difference between those unfortunates in Hell and those in Purgatory was that the former had no idea how they had sinned. Those in Hell were there forever. Those in Purgatory knew what they had done and were waiting it out with at least the possibility of redemption, thus establishing the difference between despair and hope.

In regard to professional ethics, acknowledging what it is we do is a beginning. It is clear that in the profession of graphic design the question of misrepresenting the truth arises almost immediately. So much of what we do can be seen as a distortion of the truth. Put another way, “He who enters the bath sweats.”

Finally, all questions of ethics become personal. To establish your own level of discomfort with bending the truth, read the following chart: 12 Steps on the Graphic Designer’s Road to Hell. I personally have taken a number of them.

1. Designing a package to look bigger on the shelf.
2. Designing an ad for a slow, boring film to make it seem like a lighthearted comedy.
3. Designing a crest for a new vineyard to suggest that it has been in business for a long time.
4. Designing a jacket for a book whose sexual content you find personally repellent.
5. Designing a medal using steel from the World Trade Center to be sold as a profit-making souvenir of September 11.
6. Designing an advertising campaign for a company with a history of known discrimination in minority hiring.
7. Designing a package aimed at children for a cereal whose contents you know are low in nutritional value and high in sugar.
8. Designing a line of T-shirts for a manufacturer that employs child labor.
9. Designing a promotion for a diet product that you know doesn’t work.
10. Designing an ad for a political candidate whose policies you believe would be harmful to the general public.
11. Designing a brochure for an SUV that flips over frequently in emergency conditions and is known to have killed 150 people.
12. Designing an ad for a product whose frequent use could result in the user’s death.

Nick pointed me yesterday to this blog post, by Chris Lott. It is a sort of manifesto (although apparently not the first) for what seems to be an emerging movement: slow blogging.

Slow blogging, on the concept drawn by Lott and his influences, means spending more time on posts, taking care to not distribute our thoughts half-baked. From the Slow Blogging Manifesto: "Slow Blogging does not write thoughts onto the ethereal and eternal parchment before they provide an enduring worth in the shape of our ideas over time."

Image via dawdlr: Super-slow blogging.

I’d like to counter-propose that while this conception is motivated by the right kind of concern, it misses what’s really good about blogging in the first place. I want to do this because I am deeply in agreement that blogging is an undersold platform for doing a serious kind of writing work.

The slow-blogging advocates are correct that the blog culture is often unthoughtful, and that a likely culprit for this is a supposed need to deliver an incessant stream of interesting content. The immediate and obvious (albeit unreflective) solution is to just "go lowest common denominator," and pound out aggregate blog posts until your fingers bleed. I agree with the slow-bloggers that this is non-optimal.

However, I find it overly reactionary that the correct response to this observation would be to write blog posts more like a magazine articles. The right solution here, I think, has to both take on board the legitimate criticisms of the slow bloggers and still allow itself to leverage the power of the blogging medium.

So I would suggest, as opposed to the proposed "magazine slow," something more like an interest-based (or "geological") model of blogging, where deep ideas are allowed to accrete over time from an ongoing public conversation in blog posts. The requirement for a "slow blog" would not be that each post is a criticism-worthy piece unto itself, but rather that each post contributes to an emergent argument. I would suggest that taking such a tack manages to handle both the depth and breadth concerns inherent to good blogging practice handily.^*

^* On an interesting side note, this is exactly what tag cloud navigation tracks. As themes emerge, they become more and more salient navigational elements.

Tongue firmly in cheek, I’d like call this kind of emergence-model slow-blogging slogging: Slogging means that by simply continuing to make small steps forward, you’ll eventually get somewhere.

But of course, the key is taking the time to notice what themes are emerging from your posts. So, as you tune up last year’s weather-stripping on your windows this weekend, why not spend some time pondering what your blog posts are already trying to tell you?

See—this is why Google is going to take over the world.

I ask the search engine where I’m supposed to vote in two weeks and this comes up.

Just tell Google your address and it gives you a map to your polling location. What is more, the side panel delivers timely information about how to register and vote absentee in your state.

Maybe I’m late to the party with this one, but I figured it was worth drawing some attention to a.) because people might find it useful and b.) it’s another great example of how Google gets information right. Sure, I can find the same thing on my state’s voter website, but it asks me for personal information and the interface is nowhere near as nice.

Some people say Google will be dethroned one day because their minimalism betrays a lack of design. I say, so long as the connections are this perfect (what Godin calls the architecture), they will continue to lead the way in search.

I’ve been thinking for a few days now about how I would respond to Paul’s most recent weekend ponderable.

His question was: What if you went out of your way to design an ecologically-friendly MP3 player, but in doing so, inadvertently caused the manufacturing contract to be outsourced, costing American jobs? In short, can a design be ethical despite having unethical consequences?

Whether we design sustainably or not, our decision is going to do harm to someone. As I see it, we should choose the option which does the most good for the most people– i.e. design the MP3 player with recycled materials because, ultimately, it’s better for everyone. Being environmental, in this case, is a higher obligation.

Fair enough, but how does one do that?

Yesterday, Paul wrote that, to be ethical, designers must be accountable, which is a position I wholeheartedly agree with.

Being accountable, one must not merely consider the consequences and make the tough choice; one must be prepared to confront those choices head-on; own up to the bad consequences and state one’s case for the good in those actions. I’m not talking about selling the idea, I’m talking about standing up for the idea.

Without culpability, ethics devolve into cost-benefit analysis– they’re a feature of the design, not an obligation of the designer.

This brings to mind one of the pivotal scenes in The West Wing, when it becomes clear that Martin Sheen’s character (Bartlet) is not a typical politician– he is accountable.

“I screwed you. You got hosed. [But] I didn’t want it to be hard for people to buy milk.”

MAN
Governor Bartlet, when you were a member of Congress, you voted against the New England Dairy Farming Compact. That vote hurt me sir.

MAN
I’m a businessman. That vote hurt me to the tune of maybe, 10 cents a gallon. I voted for you three times for Congress. I voted for you twice for Governor.

MAN
And I’m here sir, and I’d like to ask you for an explanation.

BARTLET
[pause] Yeah, I screwed you on that one.

MAN
I’m sorry?

BARTLET
I screwed you. You got hosed.

MAN
Sir, I…

BARTLET
And not just you. A lot of my constituents. I put the hammer to farms in Concord, Salem, Laconia, and Elem.

BARTLET
You guys got rogered but good.

BARTLET
Today, for the first time in history, one in five Americans living in poverty are children.

BARTLET
One in five children live in the most abject, dangerous, hopeless, backbreaking, gut wrenching, poverty, one in five, and they’re children. If fidelity to freedom and democracy is the code of our civic religion then surely, the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment that says “We shall give our children better than we ourselves had.”

I voted against the bill ’cause I didn’t want it to be hard for people to buy milk. I stopped some money from flowing into your pocket. If that angers you, if you resent me, I completely respect that, but if you expect anything different from the President of the United States, I suggest you vote for somebody else.

Thanks very much. Hope you enjoyed the chicken.

Instead of dodging the issue, Bartlet tells the man plainly that, in order to do the most good, leaders can’t always make everyone happy.

Which is Paul’s point, I believe: being perfectly ethical may be unattainable. What we can –and should– do is strive to be perfectly accountable.