I read Dr. Safiya U. Noble’s Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls in addition to Adam Lefton’s As a Designer, I Refuse to Call People ‘Users’. I really enjoyed Adam Lefton’s article on ‘Users’ and ‘U-words’; as a student who recently decided to stop pursuing UI/UX, his writing vocalized something I think I’ve been feeling subconsciously for a while. I thought at first that the thing that turned me away from UI/UX was the research portion and case studies, as I was always more interested in the visual aesthetics and “common sense” principles when it came to designing interfaces. However, I heavily agree with Lefton’s point that this subsection of design has evolved far past its initial purpose, and in my opinion, has become heavily tainted with consumerism.
Of course, what hasn’t? Every aspect of life now is commercialized. But UI/UX in particular has lost its sense of benevolence, especially because of its proximity to the tech industry. Instead of focusing solely on enhancing user experiences for the sake of usability and satisfaction, it has transformed into a tool for corporations to manipulate users into buying their products and services—or stay on their platforms for extended periods so another company can make use of their attention. These dark design techniques are engineered by UI/UX designers to exploit human psychology, often at the expense of user autonomy. And without autonomy, Lefton argues that we aren’t really “users”; the technology is using us as much as we use it.
It’s not as much about creating interfaces that genuinely serve needs anymore. There are many designers and small companies who still value this, but in the wider, corporate scheme of things, it's about profits and capturing attention at any cost. I think this shift disillusioned me, and really only hit me after I had gone through some corporate internship interviews. I still describe myself as a UI/UX designer in some past projects I was a part of, but for the most part, have rebranded to “Designer/Artist”. This was less about what Lefton discusses though, and more because I want to move towards art/creative direction, where many people are generalists and don’t define themselves within a specific branch of design. This article gives me more reason to stick with that.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble’s Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls was also an interesting read, although it talked about ideas I was more familiar with than in Lefton’s article. I’m highly grateful that DESMA and my Digital Humanities minor heavily emphasize bias in technology throughout their coursework and encourage us to be critical, because as Dr. Noble discusses, many educational programs don’t do that.
The thing I want to discuss most, however, is the interesting contrast to the article we read last week about Google. It seemed like the stance in our last class discussion was that one huge entity controlling a majority of online knowledge and data was dangerous and that we should move away from it. We critiqued the previous Google CEO’s statement about how multiple results are a bug, because what kind of world would it be if they could censor whatever information they wanted and give us only one result that’s theirs?
While I don’t think this article is opposing it, it does bring into question whether this control could be a good thing. After people began to point out the oppressive bias of Google searches, Google moved to balance it and manually removed some harmful, stereotyping results. This was a great change and was able to be rolled out to so many people around the world only because of the superpower that Google is.
Ideally, bias in technology would not exist at all with extensive education on racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination, but we have to accept that it’ll be a while before we reach that ideal world. In the meantime, is it a good thing that Google can manipulate their results if they’re manipulating them for a good cause?