[msencenb]

In defense of the d.school, what they teach are techniques and tools - not ethics.

UX broadly is in the same boat. UX is a tool. We can use it for good or for evil.

At the end of the day UX is only as valuable as how well individuals (or companies) can align their personal definition of 'good' with 'good' that the underlying company cares for.

[frenchy]

> In defense of the d.school, what they teach are techniques and tools - not ethics.

Is that a defence? That sounds like trying to explain your friend's rudeness away by saying "In Bob's defence, he's an asshole".

I guess this is partly a philisophical question about whether the job of schools is to raise effective citizens, or effective market manipulators.

[msencenb]

I put it poorly in my first comment.

I think it would be correct to say that receiving an education should teach you about ethics. Whether that should be strategic from the top down (you take specific classes about ethics) or embedded in each class is a question I don’t know the answer to.

In an individual class the amount of ethics varies. When I took d.school classes there certainly wasn’t a “market mover” mentality. We were genuinely interested in understanding people better so we could improve lives. But ethics certainly wasn’t explicitly on the agenda. We just didn’t have any assholes taking the course at that time.

This is part of the argument within the university for loosening credit requirements. When I was there, I took the HCI track. That track had the smallest credit requirement and also let you take a broader base of classes that counted towards the major, such as philosophy. That was a more rounded experience than some of my peers who took harder cs tracks like networking and systems.

[asoneth]

At least when I was teaching intro HCI courses at Carnegie Mellon we did have lectures and discussions on dark patterns and the ethics of UX. Taking advantage of human psychology to manipulate people has been a problem in the field for a long time (e.g. gambling machines, advertising, dark patterns, screen addiction) so IMO it's a bit irresponsible not to at least warn students that they're likely going to be asked to do some morally questionable things.

[specialist]

Was Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things in your syllabus?

Although tangental, I can't imagine the cognitive psychology stuff one must learn managed to completely omit ethics.