Reading Response #8 to Artful Design • Chapter 8/Coda: “Manifesto”
Sami Wurm
Nov 19th, 2022
Music 256A / CS476a, Stanford University
Reading Response: The Ethos of Design: Designing with an Ethic of Love
For this final chapter, I have so many thoughts. I’d like to start by responding to Artful Design Principle 8.12, which states:
Principle 8.12: Worthiness of Survival is a Stronger Notion than Survival Itself.
In times of restlessness and ongoing strife, we can be so hungry for change — technological, cultural, social, political — that we often forget to ask “what makes us worthy of change?” This is a situation in which the end does not always justify the means. How we get there matters.
The times in my life when I have found myself most considering the ‘worthiness of survival’ of a thing is in my relationships. The idea that we must consider the worthiness of survival of the things we build reminds me of a quote I read in All About Love by one of my favorite philosophers, bell hooks. In it, she says that we must all strive to live “by the principles of a love ethic” (page 101), and that
“ Love is as love does… When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect… are the opposites of nurturance and care” (page 6).
I like to think that I design not only my relationships, but my art, with ‘an ethic of love’ in mind. I have talked, throughout this quarter, about how I want my audiences to feel seen/heard/understood/nurtured/safe. I realize now that I truly just want to create loving experiences for myself and others. I want to cultivate and spread love. And I believe that pure, true ‘Love’ in the way that bell hooks describes it is what ultimately determines whether our endeavors are in fact worthy of survival.
If my intentions, as well as the consequences of my artistic endeavors truly make people feel ‘care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, honesty, and open communication’ (All About Love, page 5) and not hurt or abuse, then I believe that they are worthy of survival.
We must consider the worthiness of our creations, especially in these times, where “our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. [and] More than machinery, we need humanity” (Artful Design, page 406). I do believe that we are all living in a Platonically inspired ‘technology cave’ (page 404) and that we are becoming more and more disconnected from ourselves and the natural world.
We are experiencing mass loneliness and despair as we technologically advance at an astronomical rate. And more than that, there are almost no cyber ethics and laws in place to make sure that the innovations occurring are in the interest of the public. It’s great (and necessary) that we want to create with an ethic of love, but who will enforce these ethics? It is suggested in Principle 8.5, page 406, that “we cannot simply build systems and say ‘however people use them is not our problem.’” This is to say that it is up to developers to not develop things that can be used harmfully. This statement puts all of the onus of the societal effects of technology on developers.
While I do believe in taking individual responsibility in building humanistic products for the good of the people, I do not think that it is reasonable to put all blame on developers. Our lack of space for humanistic/safe technological advancement is a systemic problem as we do not have infrastructure that supports ethics in our field. Sure we could look at https://ethics.acm.org/ and read guidelines on what technology ‘should be like,’ or watch Mark Zuckerberg on trial in court talking about why it’s okay that his ‘technology company’ is stealing personal data from people and wide-spreading false information, but at the end of the day, what is happening to people who innovate unethically?
There have been countless, clearly unethical, studies and practices done in which the public has taken issue with companies like Facebook, OKCupid, Microsoft, and more. I talk about these different case studies in another article, Data Science Ethics: Case Studies. However, all of these cases are left in the air because courts do not know who to blame when something involving advanced technologies goes wrong. If an automatic car kills a pedestrian, are we going to sue the car company? Does that really do anyone justice? Does the car company really care or even feel any effect from having to pay a fee for taking someone’s life?
These are complex questions with endless variations that we must look into going forward. And while I love considering myself a humanist engineer (page 426), philosophizing about what is best for society and why we should be moral simply for our own good/integrity/inner peace (page 410), dreaming about the tiny butterfly effects that good design can eventually accumulate that will cause a shift in our culture for the better (page 417), and thinking about myself and all designers as “artist-philosopher-engineers of useful things that understand us” (page 412) — at the end of the day, we can not build an ethical technological world going forward all on our own.
As H.L. Mencken said, “for every complex human problem, there is a simple solution. And it is always wrong” (page 424). We need teams of people who focus on ethics and we need legislation that enforces technological ethics. We need legislators who understand technology and know what questions to ask. We need STEM and tech programs to require ethics courses so that all developers building in our fast-paced technological world have some understanding of the implications of what they are doing, and how they might want to be doing it.
It is so blatantly obvious today how our lack of ethical infrastructure fails us. Look at the mess that currently is Twitter. Here are some threads that are particularly telling of the ethical implications of decisions that have been made at Twitter already, & worse, the decisions that could be made at Twitter going forward.
The ethics of creating and pushing forward technology is nuanced. Some days I feel like we have enough. Others I feel like there will never be a time when it’s not right to keep pursuing new sources of human joy, curiosity, and connection. I appreciate Artful Design so much and I feel that it has put so many things that I have felt as a creator over the years into words for me. I will always strive to be a humanist engineer and a designer with an ethic of love while I continue to hope for more, and egg our society on to make changes supporting the systemic safety and good of the advancement of our field and our world as a whole.