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This month, Mike & Will are talking to the designer and ethicist Cennydd BowlesHe is a principal technology adviser at the ICO, author of Future Ethics, and a visiting lecturer at the RCA and Manchester Met.Cennydd's views on the ethics of technology and design have been quoted by Forbes, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal. He has spoken on responsible innovation at Facebook, Stanford University, and Google, and is currently studying practical ethics at the University of Oxford.Further Reading: https://cennydd.com/future-ethicshttp://tarotcardsoftech.artefactgroup.comhttps://ethicalexplorer.orghttps://www.ethicsfordesigners.comhttps://www.designethically.com
We kick off our Throwback Summer series with a re-release of our conversation with Indi Young, a qualitative data scientist. Indi helps organizations better understand human behavior for product design strategy and innovation. Find Indi Young Online:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/Website: https://indiyoung.com/Referenced:Dr. Brene Brown: https://brenebrown.com Inside Out by Pixar:https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Out-Plus-Bonus-Features/dp/B00ZZMEBFSPractical Empathy: For Creativity and Collaboration in Your Work by Indi Young:https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/practical-empathy/Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indi Young: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowles:https://www.amazon.com/Future-Ethics-Cennydd-Bowles/dp/1999601912 We Get Real AF Podcast Credits:Producers & Hosts: Vanessa Alava & Sue RobinsonVanessa AlavaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessahalava/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vanessahalava/Twitter: https://twitter.com/vanessahalava Sue RobinsonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sue-robinson-29025623/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/memyselfandfinds/Twitter: https://twitter.com/sociallysue_Audio Producer/Editor: Sam McleanInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/mcleansounds/Website: www.inphase.bizAudio Music Track Title: Beatles UniteArtist: Rachel K. CollierYouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiHnYgtOn8u9YovYplMeXcwInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachelkcollier/Website: https://www.rachelkcollier.com Intro Voice-Over Artist: Veronica HortaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/veronicahorta/Cover Artwork Photo Credit: https://unsplash.com/@alicemoore We Get Real AF Podcast OnlineInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/wegetrealaf/Twitter: https://twitter.com/wegetrealafFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/wegetrealaf/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wegetrealafWebsite: https://wegetrealaf.cThis episode is part of the Summer Throwback series - a re-release of favorite WeGRAF episodes. The We Get Real AF podcast is a production of MicDrop Creative, telling inclusive stories through film and media.Support the show
The guest of this podcast episode is an old friend of WUDRome, in fact, he was one of the speakers we met in the 2018 edition to discuss together the theme "Design for Good or Evil". It's been a few years but the debate about the political, social, and moral repercussions of progress is still relevant. Cennyd Bowles, author of "Future Ethics", returned to engage with us on an important topic: is technology neutral? And why would people think that? According to the first of Kranzberg's six laws, Technology "is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral". So what is the role of design? And if technology can prove to be a resource and a threat at the same time, what can we do to be in control? Our discussion in the company of Cennyd Bowles starts from here to reflect on the tools we already have and the journey to follow. Enjoy listening to S03E01 “Can technology be neutral?” RESOURCES AND NOTES Cennydd Bowles – Future Ethics Ariel Guerzenvaig – The Goods of Design Pavani Reddy – Ethical Product Development IEEE - Ethically Aligned Design v2 Kat Zhou - designethically.com ethicalexplorer.org CENNYDD BOWLES BIO Cennydd Bowles is a designer and futurist with twenty years of experience advising companies including Twitter, Samsung, Orange, and the BBC. He is the author of Future Ethics and head of responsible design and innovation studio NowNext. SOCIAL LINKS https://twitter.com/cennydd --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/nois3/message
Product people are charged with representing the needs of the customer as well as the needs of the business—but what happens when these are in conflict? We asked ethics consultant Cennydd Bowles to chat with us about how to handle some tricky situations in product.Featured Links: Follow Cennydd on LinkedIn and Twitter | Cennydd's website | NowNext Studio | 'What is the Gini Coefficient?' piece at CFI | Cennydd's book 'Future Ethics: the must read guide to the ethics of emerging technology'
This episode is our second bonus compilation of answers from previous years of interviews asking the question: What is AI? We hear from past interviewees Jess Smith, Rishal Hurbans, Jacob Turner, Cennydd Bowles, Joanna J Bryson, Damien Williams, Olivia Gamelin, David Gunkel, Bertram Malle, David Yakobovitch, Luciano Floridi, Lydia Nicholas.
In this episode, Cennydd Bowles discusses the latest landscape for digital ethics and how it is manifest in society and business today. This is a fascinating episode and gives us a real deep insight into the mind of a leading futurist and tech insider.
Cennydd Bowles keynote talk at Mind The Product Digital, November 2020 (re-recorded). Transcript at https://cennydd.com/blog/all-these-worlds-are-yours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29cgBI32z2A
This week on Draw Two Design, Demetruis discusses what helps users decode through information in interfaces. There are lot of really nice resources to check out as a supplemental takeaway here in the show notes! We strongly recommend to check out Part 1 in Episode 9 and Part 2 in Episode 10 before giving this a listen. Resources: Why Do We Interface? by Ehsan Noursalehi Menu Design: Checklist of 15 UX Guidelines to Help Users by Kathryn Whitenton Hearthstone: How to Create an Immersive User Interface by Derek Sakamoto Why I'm losing faith in UX by Mark Hurst Design Ethics by Cennydd Bowles Podcast Cover Art: Junel Aceres Music: Theme song is created by Dominic Mucker via @Dmagic_22 Lost Paradise by Purrple Cat | Promoted by Royalty Free Planet | Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Lone Peak Music – Building Bridges I'd love your feedback or questions, so feel free to tweet at @drawtwodesign or reach out privately through email!
Future Ethics is a book by Cennydd Bowles that challenges technologists to stand up for change, and teaches methods for building a fairer future.Show NotesBonfire audio from jgrzinich
In this episode, we are joined by Cennydd Bowles, author of Future Ethics, and Director of NowNext, the ethical design and futures studio. In the episode, we talk about Future Ethics, and how we can use methods from disciplines such as speculative design and future studies to stimulate moral imagination. We also discuss the role of ethical guidelines, bringing those into practice, and how you can start having more conversations within your team or organisation around ethics.
Twitter: @4erepawko Read: "Future Ethics" by Cennydd Bowles and "Your Silence Will Not Protect You" by Audre Lorde Check out: Noname at @noname and the Noname Book Club Support our guests and the creation of future episodes through sponsorship (bezier.show/support) or by buying Bézier swag. This episode of Bézier is sponsored by SuperHi. Transcript link. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bezier/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bezier/support
The perils of developing a user-centric design with Futurist and Designer Cennydd Bowles.
Web: rosiemaharjan.com Twitter: @rosiemaharjan Instagram: rosie.png Sign up for the Rocks waitlist: rocksapp.co Check out Rosie's viral chatbot and Janelle Monae's Dirty Computer Read "The Ethical Algorithm" by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth, and "Future Ethics" by Cennydd Bowles. Support our guests and the creation of future episodes through sponsorship (bezier.show/support) or by buying Bézier swag. This episode of Bézier is sponsored by SuperHi. Transcript link. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bezier/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bezier/support
Indi is an independent qualitative data scientist who provides organizations solid data to guide product design strategy and spark innovation by better understanding human behavior. Find Indi Young Online:Medium: https://medium.com/@indiyoungLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/indiyoung Website: https://indiyoung.com/Referenced:Dr. Brene Brown: https://brenebrown.com Inside Out by Pixar:https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Out-Plus-Bonus-Features/dp/B00ZZMEBFS Practical Empathy: For Creativity and Collaboration in Your Work by Indi Young:https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/practical-empathy/Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indi Young: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowles: https://www.amazon.com/Future-Ethics-Cennydd-Bowles/dp/1999601912 We Get Real AF Podcast Credits:Producers & Hosts: Vanessa Alava & Sue RobinsonVanessa AlavaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessahalava/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vanessahalava/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/vanessahalava Sue RobinsonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sue-robinson-29025623/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/memyselfandfinds/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/sociallysue_Audio Producer/Editor: Sam Mclean Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mcleansounds/Website: www.inphase.bizAudio Music Track Title: Beatles UniteArtist: Rachel K. CollierYouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiHnYgtOn8u9YovYplMeXcwInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachelkcollier/ Website: https://www.rachelkcollier.com Intro Voice-Over Artist: Veronica HortaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/veronicahorta/Cover Artwork Photo Credit: https://unsplash.com/@alicemoore We Get Real AF Podcast OnlineInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/wegetrealaf/Twitter: https://twitter.com/wegetrealafFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/wegetrealaf/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wegetrealafWebsite: https://wegetrealaf.com Support the show (https://wegetrealaf.com/how-you-can-help)
Futurist, designer, and ethicist Cennydd Bowles discusses why design often creates as many problems as it solves, the failures of “design thinking,” and the importance of bringing a longer-term perspective to addressing systemic changes.
Technology is disrupting our world at unimaginable speed. Its impact on society is often unforeseen, both for good and for bad. In this episode of Old Fox Young Fox, Designer, futurist and author Cennydd Bowles helps us navigate this moral maze together. Questions posed include: Do Tech companies and individuals have any moral or ethical responsibility for the impact of their technologies? How does society protect itself when we have neither the knowledge or technical expertise to understand what's going on? Has the battle already been lost? About the show: Old Fox Young Fox is an intergenerational conversation between Jeremy Woolwich and Oliver Happy, one that explores the impacts of a rapidly changing world. Check out Ollie's new show: https://problembusters.fm (Problem Busters) Show mentions: NowNext studio: https://nownext.studio/ (https://nownext.studio/) Book: Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowles: https://nownext.studio/future-ethics (https://nownext.studio/future-ethics) Book: Sprint by Jake Knapp: https://www.thesprintbook.com/ (https://www.thesprintbook.com/) Ethical Design Sprint Workshops: https://nownext.studio/ethics-workshop (https://nownext.studio/ethics-workshop) Book: Book: Moralising technology by Peter-Paul Verbeek: https://my.captivate.fm/shorturl.at/adB36 (shorturl.at/adB36) "Fostering an ethically courageous culture" by Philip Zimbardo: https://my.captivate.fm/shorturl.at/dmnCY (shorturl.at/dmnCY) About our guest: Cennydd Bowles is a designer, futurist and author whose experience includes working with Twitter, Samsung, The BBC and Google. He has lectured at Stanford University, Facebook and has been an invited expert to the UN. Cennydd is a commentator on ethics for The Guardian, MIT Press, WIRED and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of https://www.future-ethics.com/ (Future Ethics )and runs ethical design studio https://www.nownext.studio/ (NowNext). Website: https://cennydd.com/ (https://cennydd.com/) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cennydd/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cennydd/) Support the show As an independent podcast, Old Fox Young Fox is listener-funded. You can support us via Patreon: https://donate.oldfoxyoungfox.com (https://donate.oldfoxyoungfox.com). This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp Support this podcast
Web: geremy.design Twitter: @geremygood Zacht Studios: zacht.studio Read: "So You Want to Talk about Race" by Ijeoma Oluo, "Future Ethics" by Cennydd Bowles, and "Mismatch" by Kat Holmes. Listen to Prince. Support our guests and the creation of future episodes through sponsorship (bezier.show/support) or by buying Bézier swag. Transcript link. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bezier/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bezier/support
In this episode, Cennydd Bowles discusses the latest landscape for digital ethics and how it is manifest in society and business today. This is a fascinating episode and gives us a real deep insight into the mind of a leading futurist and tech insider.
Special guest Cennydd Bowles joins the show. He’s a designer, futurist, and author of the book Future Ethics. We discuss what we can learn from the digital mistakes of the past to inform the designs of the future.
Cennydd Bowles is a London-based digital product designer and futurist, with almost two decades of consulting experience working with some of the largest and most influential brands in the world. Cennydd has earned a reputation as a trusted guide, helping companies navigate complex issues related to design, technology, and ethics. He’s also the author of Future Ethics, a book which outlines key ethical principles and methods for constructing a fairer future. In this episode, Cennydd and I explore the role that ethics plays in design and innovation, and why so many companies today—in Silicon Valley and beyond—are failing to recognize the human element of their technological pursuits. Cennydd offers his unique perspective, along with some practical tips that technologists can use to design with greater mindfulness and consideration for others. In our chat, we covered topics from Cennydd’s book and expertise including: Why there is growing resentment towards the tech industry and the reason all companies and innovators need to pay attention to ethics The importance of framing so that teams look beyond the creation of an “ethical product / solution” and out towards a better society and future The role that diversity plays in ethics and the reason why homogenous teams working in isolation can be dangerous for an organization and society Cennydd’s “front-page test,” “designated dissenter,” and other actionable ethics tips that innovators and data product teams can apply starting today Navigating the gray areas of ethics and how large companies handle them The unfortunate consequences that arise when data product teams are complacent The fallacy that data is neutral—and why there is no such thing as “raw” data Why stakeholders must take part in ethics conversations Resources and Links: Cennydd Bowles Future Ethics (book) Design for Real Life The Trouble with Bias Twitter: @cennydd Quotes from Today’s Episode “There ought to be a clearer relationship between innovation and its social impacts.” — Cennydd “I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think there was a strong upside to technology, or if I didn't think it couldn't advance the species.” — Cennydd “I think as our power has grown, we have failed to use that power responsibly, and so it's absolutely fair that we be held to account for those mistakes.” — Cennydd “I like to assume most creators and data people are trying to do good work. They're not trying to do ethically wrong things. They just lack the experience or tools and methods to design with intent.” — Brian “Ethics is about discussion and it's about decisions; it's not about abstract theory.” — Cennydd “I have seen many times diversity act as an ethical early warning system [where] people who firmly believe the solution they're about to put out into the world is, if not flawless, pretty damn close.” — Cennydd “The ethical questions around the misapplication or the abuse of data are strong and prominent, and actually have achieved maybe even more recognition than other forms of harm that I talk about.” — Cennydd “There aren't a whole lot of ethical issues that are black and white.” — Cennydd “When you never talk to a customer or user, it's really easy to make choices that can screw them at the benefit of increasing some KPI or busi
This is a special episode of Presentable recorded live in front of an audience at the New Adventures conference in Nottingham, England. It is a roundtable conversation with the event's speakers: Cennydd Bowles, Akil Benjamin, Natalie Kane.
Ethics, technology and the impact of our decisions on customers and employees - Interview with Cennydd Bowles, a designer and writer focusing on the ethics of emerging technologies. Cennydd joins me today to talk about ethics, technology, emerging technology, design and the impact of the decisions we make on customers and employees.
On our second podcast episode, Founder Max Gadney sat down with author and designer Cennydd Bowles. Cennydd is widely recognised for his book Future Ethics – an exploration on what technologists and the design industry can do to challenge the values and ethical principles of the work they do. He has worked with clients such as Twitter, Ford, Cisco and the BBC and has lectured at Facebook, Stanford University and Google. Max and Cennydd discuss real-life examples of collective action, and what designers and technologists can do to create a momentum of change. You can find out more about Cennydd’s work at www.future-ethics.com. Mentions Future Ethics.Speculative Everything – Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming – Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Superflux.Nudge Theory.Google walkouts.Government Design Principles.Client Earth.Hooked – Nir Eyla.The Uninhabitable Earth – David Wallace-Wells.Certified B Corporation.Climate change movement: Alex Steffen, Bill Mckibben, Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movement, Greta Thunberg.
My guest today is Chris Chandler. Chris is a partner at Philosophie, a strategic software design and development studio. He's also a self-described “agilista,” and in this episode we discuss how designers — especially those working in agile environments — can embrace an ethical approach to their work. Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/the-informed-life-episode-20-chris-chandler.mp3 Show notes Chris Chandler on Twitter UCLA Department of Information Studies Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville Marcia Bates Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Magic Bands at Walt Disney World Kevin Cheng OK/Cancel Philosophie The Informed Life Episode 15: Jeff Sussna on Cybernetics DevOps Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowles Arturo Perez Bridges the Gap Between UX Design and Metaphysics Friedrich Nietzsche Jacques Derrida Jean Baudrillard Stephen Colbert Existentialism The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir Jean-Paul Sartre Peter Singer Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women Read the full transcript Jorge: Chris, welcome to the show. Chris: Thanks Jorge. Great to be here. Jorge: Well, I'm very happy to have you here. For folks who don't know you, tell us about yourself. Chris: Sure. Let's see. My career path is gone something like this. I started out, you know, my academic background was more in the social sciences and anthropology. I'm from the Gold Rush generation of internet people coming up in the in the in the mid to late 90s. Fell into web design. I thought for a while I was a webmaster, I built pages for the group I worked at UCLA and then found the information architecture polar bear book, met Marcia Bates at UCLA — I was working in the Library School of information Studies. And I realized that I cared a lot more about the structuring and the conversations about what we should be doing and who were presenting it for than I did about writing code. So, I began a transformation in my life to become a designer. And I'll tell you it took me a very long time to sort of own that self-definition. I didn't think of myself that way. I'm not a visual thinker; I'm a thinker in words. And so, I worked I got a job in the early 2000s — 2003 — at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Online, and I was there for 10 years. And I think in many ways that that was pretty foundational to my thought process and sort of approach to online experiences. It was tremendous — and you and I have talked about this many many times — in the sense that it's an amazing organization that is very, very user-, customer-, guest-centric. And it was also at the same time a very large corporation that was you know, very much wanting to be a global capitalist enterprise. So, the highs and the lows in terms of the experience, but really amazing to work there. And I got to work on some gigantic projects. I spent the last three years at Disney working on the Magic Band experience at Disney World. And during that process, I joked at the time that the only thing I really designed was workflow. Right? There was a lot of teams and a lot of different groups and a lot of information and I slowly realized that I was spending more of my time with the product management group because the way I looked at it is I had such a strong perspective about being guest-centric, that I always had an opinion about priority. And you know, product managers in a big organization are supposed to set priority, but they typically — unless they've got a very strong metric that they're aiming for, a clear goal — they tend to react to the loudest voice in the room. So, you know the fact that I could help them and give them a guest-centric [inaudible] just realized I was spending more time thinking about planning and priorities and I slowly began to realize that I think maybe I was a product person, more than a designer. In fact, Kevin Cheng — the OK/Cancel writer — UX designer, also a product person. He changed my life and in one sentence he said to me, “Well, I feel like designers are about making things perfect and product people are about good enough.” And with that simple sentence, I realized that I was a good-enough person. And it dovetailed with what I sometimes call a religious conversion to the agile world. So, the post-Disney arc of my career has been to move into product and to become a dedicated “agilista.” The big realization for me, the moment for me, was to think that all of the value of the design that I worked on, it didn't get realized until code hit production. And so that fundamental thought has really reoriented my entire practice around, “What am I doing to make more better code hit production.” And anything I'm doing that doesn't result in more and better code hitting production, I really need to look at and evaluate as to whether it's waste or not, wasteful in the process. So, I went from Disney to Fandango, the online movie ticket sales company, and then after a couple of years there I left to become a full-fledged product strategist and a full-fledged agile person at a software development consulting company called Philosophie. So I've been at Philosophie for four years. I head the product strategy practice here. And I am… Yeah, I am now a proud product person. Jorge: You've surfaced a distinction that I hear coming up in the design twittersphere, which is a distinction between design and agile. And I'm wondering if you can elaborate a bit on that, because I'm always very wary of it, of that distinction. I think it might be a false duality. Chris: Yeah, I agree with that. I feel like… I think this might be a little bit of a theme for me, Jorge, is the difference between the ideal and the real. Right? I think that the critiques of the agile method to design strike me as a little bit of what's… Strawman? In the sense that I think if you think about the greatest designers, and there's definitely, you know, as I said, the distinction before about design being about perfection. Right? I think there's a part of design practices that is like “more time equals higher quality,” right? The ability to get all the little details right, the ability to be consistent across platforms, to think through design systems. I definitely think that there is truth to that from a from a design perspective. But if I think about the real and the way that most of my work went, right? It's not like anybody was ever given all the time in the world to do the design anyway. And when I worked in the more traditional waterfall fashion, I wouldn't describe that as a method for getting the best design. So there's a false distinction there between the methodology of software development versus the demands of the discipline. I suffered more in the waterfall method, right? I felt like we did a lot of work to get the design right but a lot of that had to be changed or compromised in order to get the first version done as the designers worked on their design and then gave it to the developers to do. Just a very quick down and dirty example. When we were working on that Disney World project I mentioned before, we went to a lot of trouble to design custom UI components for the search field and for the dropdowns in the global navigation. And they were heavily branded and they had nice micro animations and they sailed through our creative reviews and got approved. Well, it wasn't until almost a year and a half later, when I realized that the development team was spending an inordinate amount of time to try to make these custom UI components work across browsers in their world of how things went. And it struck me right like, “Hey, what is the value of this incredible design if it can't be realized?” So, when people complain that agile doesn't give designers enough time, my first caveat is, “Well, does waterfall give designers enough time?” I don't think you can answer that in the affirmative, to your point. Recently I read a quote from Jeff Bezos about, “Hey, in this business, if you're waiting till you have a hundred percent of the information, you've waited too long.” Right? Like, you probably should be moving forward at about 70 percent certainty or knowledge. And I think that's the kind of balance. Another version of saying this, which is that when we look at what it takes to build a digital product, we have the design, we have the experience. Then we have the technical aspects, the functional aspect, and then we also have the business aspects. Right? And so, I think the question should always be, how are those three things being balanced in order to produce a product at the end of the line. So, you know, I do sometimes call myself a design traitor, a UX traitor, Jorge, because I feel like I've shifted the emphasis in my thinking. But to balance out those three things, I think of as a design project. I mean that now is my framing, right? I think of design thinking like, how do I balance these three forces because it's not possible to optimize for all three. There's a lot of hard thinking and contingent choices that goes into that balance and it's constantly changing. Jorge: So, it's not that you don't have an ideal that you're moving towards in agile, it's that you haven't over-optimized for that ideal before you have all the information needed to actually do so. Is that a fair statement? Chris: I think that's terrific. Yeah, I agree with that. Jorge: We actually had a previous guest on the show, Jeff Sussna, who spoke about cybernetics, and he was making a similar point. And the way that he articulated it is, he says that what he's aiming to do is to move fast without breaking things. There's this notion that you can move forward towards a destination a way that isn't overly rigid and overly specified, that lets you make it responsive to conditions in the real world. Chris: Yeah, I think that a sort of connection to talk about this — and something I'd recommend people who are interested read more about — is… I'm sort of fascinated by the movement of DevOps. So, this is sort of, again, thinking about code getting into production and working backwards. Right? Lots of teams have got very convoluted processes for how this happens. And to me, the interesting insight from the world of DevOps is that if you can work the kinks, if you can remove bottlenecks and create a process where the code flows from the developers into the production environment on a much more reliable and consistent and fast basis, in a way it gives you that ability to move fast and not break things or to not break things so seriously that you can't recover from them also quickly. So in the world of software we went from companies doing giant software releases, where they might do a release a quarter, or — that's actually, could have been fast for my Disney experience, right? — maybe a release twice a year or three times a year, to companies now that push code into production multiple to hundreds of times a day. And a lot of that is about automating those processes and pipelines to make sure that you're not breaking things. Right? A lot of that impetus for that movement comes from the automation of the QA processes. Right? Like, I want to make sure that when the code hits production all of my tests are automated, so I know right away if something is breaking. So I think you know to me — and this is something I'm always, honestly just to connect to another conversation in our field — I feel like doesn't necessarily get enough emphasis in the DesignOps conversation, which is you need to think about this as a continuous process that starts in ideas and ends up in code and how is the team optimized to deliver designs in production and be able to react quickly to changes? Jorge: How do you bake into that values and an ethical approach to design? Chris: I think this is obviously a current topic and an important topic to discuss. And you know, one of the things I know you and I have connected over the years about… You know, the fact of a personal philosophy and how that influences the work that you do. So, on the one hand, I'm very excited and positive and supportive of the idea that ethics and philosophy should be part and parcel of what we do. Sometimes I say that theory without practice is useless, but sometimes I'll say that practice without theory is expensive. So, if we don't know why we're doing something then it's awfully hard to make improvements and understand why something didn't go the way that it wanted to go. And you know, that's from a practical point. But I think when we talk about “expensive,” the expense of breaking things is more — and this is why it's become such a such a watchword, right? The Facebook motto — it's not just breaking software, right? Like we're talking now about maybe breaking democracy. So that can have really big consequences. That being said, I started, I was challenged by a good friend and designer here in the Los Angeles area, Arturo Perez, who did a series of presentations starting a couple years ago about philosophy and design. And as we started talking about how we could bring that together, it put me into a little bit of a journey to try… I realized that while I had a lot of thoughts and I'd studied philosophy in school, I hadn't really answered some fundamental questions for myself. So, let me talk about that for a second. One issue that we have, that comes up, that is frustrating to me… And I was wondering, when I hear Mike Monteiro speak, or when I read Cennydd Bowles's books, you know, they always felt like there were some missing elements, and I really wanted to try to identify them for myself, what I thought was going on there. One of one of the things that's missing is the idea that in order to make ethical decisions, you have to have a framework that you use to evaluate whether those decisions are ethical or not. And you know, in Cennydd's book in particular, he does a great job of laying out several different frameworks that you could use to decide whether an action was ethical, right? Like you could say — and I'm not going to use the technical philosophical terms here — but you could say that one way to evaluate whether an action is ethical is based on what happens, right? The consequences of that action. You can say, but that's sort of a post-hoc analysis, right? Like I know that this action was unethical because it ended up harming people. Another framework that you can use is to say, well if we have an agreed-upon set of rules, then we can judge actions based on those agreed-upon set of rules. And that is very helpful, but it points to the problem, which is that there are very few agreed-upon sets of rules. And so, to jump back and talk a little bit about this from a philosophical sense, I could say in some ways this is a problem that was announced by Nietzsche when he said God is dead. Right? And so, what I think he was getting at with that proclamation was the fact that for many centuries in the West, our agreed-upon set of rules were based on this Judeo-Christian ethic. Right? Based on the rules that we got from the Bible. And so we can debate all we want about how that practically worked out, but there wasn't a lot of disagreement among people about how would we judge the ethics of actions if we all were coming from a similar spiritual religious meta-narrative, if you will, about what was really important in the world. And this is a crucial, crucial issue for people in the modern world, and this is what Nietzsche was trying to say. Now that that is gone, or put a different way, now that that is no longer as compelling a narrative to as many people, now I can no longer rely on the fact that you and I, working together, might have that common set of values. It undermines exactly how we're going to go about agreeing about what is ethical and what is not ethical. Certainly, people with a religious background and adherence often challenged those of us without such a commitment to try to understand how can we tell what is good if we don't have something like that to refer to. And honestly this problem has only been exacerbated as we've gone along, through the 20th century, right? I think the idea of what is agreed upon has been very much undermined by the postmodernist movement, right? If I think about, in particular, Derrida and deconstruction, to me, what I take away from that — many things, but in this context, which is that there's no such thing as a text that is neutral. And so even when we are talking about the ethical frameworks, how to decide what is ethical, and to decide what the framework is, we no longer can talk about that in an objective way. We have to ask ourselves, “Well, who does this framework serve and who does it not serve? Right? Who are the winners and the losers? Who's above and who's below in that context?” And when I think about what we're living through in the modern world, I think another postmodernist, Baudrillard, pointed out, theorized about another very very very modern, postmodern problem that we all are living through which is that we no longer have an ability to distinguish between reality and simulated reality. And you know, we can argue about whether that was really true at the moment when he wrote it, but we're in this moment living through this extreme crisis, where deep fakes and fake news and pizza gate… You know, the very foundations of what we think of as truth, or as Stephen Colbert used to say, “truthiness,” has been undermined, those underpinnings. So that's a very long-winded discussion, Jorge. But I think the personal journey for me was, “Okay, if I do not have a religious… An appeal to a greater narrative beyond this life, what exactly am I basing my ethics on?” Jorge: I'm wondering as you're describing this, how this line of thinking can help designers — in particular designers that are working within agile environments — to make more ethical decisions, to work towards not breaking things. Chris: So, then I started searching for anybody who had answers to that question. Because, like I said that was… Philosophically, I was like, I feel like we know the frameworks — and again, Cennydd does a great job of doing the frameworks, Mike Monteiro does a great job of explaining our own complicit nature as designers in the world that we're going through. And I found solace and comfort and firm footing in a what I thought was an odd place, which is in existentialism, the philosophical school of existentialism. And in particular, there's a book by Simone de Beauvoir called The Ethics of Ambiguity. And I think she's most well-known for her book The Second Sex, which is a foundational text for the modern feminism movement. Really, she laid out her main thesis in that book, is that people become women. They're not born women, they become women. And it really emphasizes the social roles. I recommend it highly to anyone, because I think it explains a lot of the critique and ongoing discussions around gender roles in society. But Jean-Paul Sartre, he said a couple of things and he wrote many many things. And so, this is… By no means am I an expert or am I trying to be faithful to everything that he said, but just in the snapshot, one of the things that an existentialist believes is, he said, is that man is condemned to be free. So, pardon the gender-specific language there, but humans are condemned to be free, which is really… Fundamentally, our life and what we make of our life is based on the choices that we make, and we cannot choose not to choose. Or to put a different way not choosing is a choice in itself. So, this is a very fundamental principle, and it in some ways it, you know goes to a conclusion that you know, existentialism and existentialists say that the ultimate choice might be whether to live or not live. And even if your choices are constrained — and I think there's a lot of talk about that, especially if we want to talk about privileges and how society is structured — but I think the existentialist response is, you know, you can always choose not to continue living. So, it's a little bit… It's a dark philosophy. So, Simone de Beauvoir took it upon herself, she said, you know, this is all great, but there's no way for anyone to try to figure out how to live their life based on what you just said. So, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, she takes up the question of given this existential reality, how on Earth are we supposed to decide how to live? And the fundamental insight that that she really emphasizes is that we have to understand that we have our subjective experiences, right? We are subjective entities, right? Nobody else can know what my experience has been. And we all are alone in that; we are subjects to ourselves. And then it's very easy to think of the other people that we deal with as objects. But Simone de Beauvoir wants to push on that a little bit — a lot — and say that really much of our lives are not based solely on our subjectivity, but on concepts of intersubjectivity. Right? Like the things that give us meaning, the things that tell us whether we're succeeding or failing are actually things that other subjects, other human beings are involved in. So, this is like just completely at breakneck speed to talk about, but what she says is that as an existentialist in the existentialism philosophy, your highest value should be to work towards your own personal freedom — what you might say, to self-actualization, to own the fact that you are making these choices and to own the consequences of those choices and to be deliberate about those choices — and to work towards freedom. And what Simone de Beauvoir on The Ethics of Ambiguity lays out is, that could be generalized if you think outside of just your subjective experience and you think that actually, you depend on other human beings. And we all live in an intersubjective world that can now be generalized to say that the highest ethical action is to work towards the freedom of yourself and other people. So, this is the aha moment for me where I can say, I now know that I can judge potential actions, potential designs, my participation in the process in the world, by whether I believe it is increasing the freedom of myself and other people. Again, we can argue about that that limitation of the word “people” I think about Peter Singer and the ability to think about the rest of the natural world and animals as part of that, I think about the conversation about how we're going to deal with artificial intelligences. But to limit it to what Simone de Beauvoir wrote, which is we want to judge our actions based on creating more freedom for people. Jorge: One of the things about design — especially in the world in which we're living, in which a digital product can impact the lives of many millions of people, it's not limited to the constraints that designers working in the world of atoms face. So, you're definitely looking after your own soul, but in some ways, you're also concerned with the souls of others, to put it into kind of religious imagery there. Chris: Yeah, I think that's definitely true. I mean, I think there's even in the world of atoms right like I think certainly when we talk about architecture, right? I think there's definitely the same impact on humans. So, we've sort of been contrasting these two writers in the two books and I want to continue that a little bit. So Cennydd does a great job in his book of sort of laying out and helping you understand what are all the issues involved. And he goes into detail with examples and it's a terrific book about the ways that you should think about those second-order effects and how the impacts of your work are going to go. But I think without understanding where you're really going, though, it's difficult to pick and choose. And so, to use an example from the AI ethics, the Amazon machine learning tool that evaluated resumes, right? And they said we're going to look at all this data of what makes a great Amazon employee and then we're going to use that to screen candidates coming into our pipeline. And of course, as we all know, that algorithm was very biased and tended to produce, you know, elevate white male candidates into their funnel. So again, it's easy for us to say that that is the wrong result. But my challenge, and the question I want to ask people is — and this is why I think you need to think fundamentally about what you really mean — is to ask yourself, well, what is the correct result? How would I know that the algorithm was producing the correct result? So, when we talk about diversity of candidates, when we talk about outcomes, I mean, you might say that it's supposed to be completely neutral. But I don't know that anybody believes in that anymore. So, you I think you have to make a positive statement. The one thing I want to implore people, as we talk about ethics, I want to talk about a human flaw that's built into us, which is: it's very important that we appear ethical to other people and to ourselves. And so that whenever we have a conversation about ethics, I've noticed that we all start acting as if we are very ethical. And I think there's a little bit of a danger in that. Because the truth is most of us can think of something less than ethical that we've done in the last 24 hours. And this is again back to the existentialism: we're making choices constantly and we don't always live up to the ethical ideals that we have. And in fact, we rarely live up to the ethical ideals that we have. So, I'm not trying to be critical of us. I'm trying to say that this is something we need to accept, right? That ethics are ideals and we're going to fall short of our ideals. And this is where I want to bring in Mike Monteiro's book where he does a great job of explaining how complicit designers are in all of these problems. But it's a little bit different to say that we should all stop working and refuse clients and turn down work and quit our jobs to be ethical. So, there's a certain… I sort of want to give us the freedom to acknowledge that we live in a contingent world where we make compromises and we fail to live up to our ethical ideals, because I think it's important that that we're allowed to be vulnerable with each other in order to have better conversations. And then the one additional point that I want to make is that when we talk about ethics of artificial intelligences, I just like to propose that to set the bar at human ethical standards would be a bit of a tragedy. Humans, we don't have a great track record on ethics and I hope — we all better hope — that the artificial intelligences, should we ever get to a generalized artificial intelligence, I think we should all hope that that intelligence would be more ethical than human beings, not as ethical as human beings are. Jorge: That's a very provocative statement and also inspiring. And I think it's a good place for us to wrap up the conversation. I feel like we could keep talking about this stuff for a long time. So, Chris where can folks follow up with you? Chris: Oh great. Well, you can find me on Twitter, Chris Chandler, or you can email me Chris Dot Chandler at gmail.com. Jorge: Fantastic, thank you for being on the show, Chris. Chris: Thanks Jorge! Really enjoyed our conversation, as always.
Sebastiaan Knijnenburg ontdekte tijdens zijn studie dat hij beter was in PHP dan in dealen met mensen. Dus werd hij medisch informaticus en stortte hij zich op het gestructureerd verzamelen en opslaan van medische onderzoeksgegevens. Als je ergens zorgvuldig met data om moet gaan is het wel in het medische domein. Dus vroegen we Sebastiaan hoe Castor zorgt voor privacy en veiligheid ent tegelijk deze gevoelige data toch deelbaar maakt voor grote onderzoeksprojecten. Want daar hopen ze dus ooit nog de Nobelprijs voor Geneeskunde mee te winnen. Een lekker praktisch gesprek waar je ook iets aan hebt als je niet uit de medische hoek komt. David las Future Ethics van Cennydd Bowles en gaf het vijf sterren. En Laurens vertelt hoe hij viel voor Duitse charmes. mail ons met vragen en tips: redactie@glitch.show
We're back at Camp Digital and here is the final episode of our three special podcasts recorded live in Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre. Hosted by Rebecca Rae-Evans, Activist, strategist, commentator & account manager at Sigma. She's joined by podcast regular Ben White , Director at social enterprise Reason Digital. Joining them for a deep dive into some of the topics raised throughout Camp Digital 2019 are Cennydd Bowles and Matt Edgar. They discuss the latest news, trends and controversies in ethical tech. Cennydd Bowles is a London-based designer and writer with fifteen years of experience advising clients including Twitter, Ford, Cisco, and the BBC. His focus today is the ethics of emerging technology. He has lectured on the topic at Facebook, Stanford University, and Google, and is a sought-after speaker at technology and design events worldwide. His second book, Future Ethics, was published in 2018. You can find him on Twitter @Cennydd Matt Edgar is head of design for NHS Digital and his focus is on digital services for NHS patients, carers and the public, while developing designers and the design profession across the whole organisation. Matt previously spent 5 years as a service designer, digital coach, and founder of service design and innovation consultancy Stick People. He developed the GDS Service Manager Programme, and coached in the DWP Digital Academy. His service design clients included the Co-op, NHS organisations, and local government. You can find him on Twitter @mattedgar This podcast is possible thanks to the support of Podcast.co, The Federation supported by Luminate and The Co-op Foundation. And our June sponsor OneSub - they’re crowdfunding to break the echo chamber giving you instant access to a difference of opinion and helping you get a balanced view of the world. To find out more, go to https://onesub.io/crowd Find more from the Tech For Good Live team @ techforgood.live
For our first episode, we talk with Cennydd Bowles, author of Future Ethics, a book on the ethics of emerging technology. It is written for product teams looking to put age-old wisdom into practice.
On this episode Dr. Heidi interviews fellow digital ethicist Cennydd Bowles – designer and tech ethics consultant. Cennydd Bowles is a London-based designer with fifteen years of experience advising clients including Twitter, Ford, Cisco, and the BBC. His focus today is the ethics of emerging technology. He has lectured on the topic at Facebook, Stanford University, and Google, and is a sought-after speaker at technology and design events worldwide. His second book, Future Ethics, was published in 2018. Website: cennydd.com Twitter ID: @cennydd This episode is also celebrates the launch of Dr. Heidi Forbes Öste's, new #1 Bestselling book, Digital Self Mastery Across Generations, Print edition now available from all on-line booksellers, and for order in local book sellers internationally.
This month I'm joined by Cennydd Bowles who I've been meaning to get on the podcast for over a year. We talk about his book Future Ethics, collective action in the tech industry, ethical design sprints and crits, design fictions to bring ethical thinking to the general public (think Black mirror), the law of double affect, and the tech industry and climate change.
Jon: Welcome to Episode 287 of The Digital Life, a show about our insights into the future of design and technology. I'm your host, Jon Follett, and with me is founder and co-host, Dirk Knemeyer. Dirk: Greetings, listeners. Jon: This week, we'll be talking with author and designer Cennydd Bowles about ethics and emerging technologies. […]
Today’s digital technology has the power to influence our behaviour on a global scale, for better and for worse. And with financial rewards often disrupted by the need for other workplace values, such as flexibility, it’s in an employer’s best interest to ensure its digital workplace is ticking all the right ethical boxes. But what does an “ethical” digital workplace look like? Join us as we discuss who’s got it right and who’s got it wrong, trust, user centricity and striking a balance. Show notes, links and resources for this episode: Cennydd Bowles: https://www.cennydd.com Digital Workplace Wellbeing: http://www.digitalworkplacewellbeing.com Future Ethics”, by Cennydd Bowles: https://www.future-ethics.com “Your workplace is watching you!”, Digital Workplace Impact episode featuring Humanyze: https://digitalworkplacegroup.com/dwg_podcast/workplace-watching-you
Video is rapidly gaining popularity as a training format. But no shortcuts here — it's hard to produce! Today we're getting together with Ed Vinicombe, the founder of UXClub.com. He shares the story of his UX training platform, and gives us an overview of his production process. You'll learn how to start shooting videos, how to prepare content, and how to behave in front of the camera. Podcast feed: subscribe to http://simplecast.fm/podcasts/1441/rss in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play Music. Show Notes UXClub.com — Ed's video training site we're talking about Clearleft — Ed's company Behind the scenes at UXClub.com (video) Undercover UX — a book by Cennydd Bowles and James Box Value Proposition Design — a book by by Alan Smith, Alexander Osterwalder, Gregory Bernarda, Trish Papadakos, and Yves Pigneur Follow Ed on Twitter: @edvinicombe Follow Ed on Dribbble Drop Ed a line at ed@uxclub.com Today's Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Balsamiq Mockups — rapid wireframing software that combines the comfort and simplicity of paper sketching with the power of a digital tool, so your work is easier to share, revise, and get honest feedback on. Try it free for 30 days at balsamiq.com. Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here. Leave a Review Reviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here's how.
Designer/developer Val Head (@vlh) is Jeffrey Zeldman's guest. Val is the co-founder of the Web Design Day conference, co-host with Cennydd Bowles of the Motion and Meaning podcast, and author of CSS Pocket Guide (5 Simple Steps) and the upcoming Designing Interface Animations (Rosenfeld Media). Val and Zeldman discuss how to create an animation style guide, the genius of user queries, the web animation API, frame by frame animation, animating with math in Flash, Disney animation and the illusion of life, animating for meaning, how to animate without triggering vestibular disorders, resources for accessible animations, and what to eat in Lawrenceville, PA.
Designer/developer Val Head (@vlh) is Jeffrey Zeldman's guest. Val is the co-founder of the Web Design Day conference, co-host with Cennydd Bowles of the Motion and Meaning podcast, and author of CSS Pocket Guide (5 Simple Steps) and the upcoming Designing Interface Animations (Rosenfeld Media). Val and Zeldman discuss how to create an animation style guide, the genius of user queries, the web animation API, frame by frame animation, animating with math in Flash, Disney animation and the illusion of life, animating for meaning, how to animate without triggering vestibular disorders, resources for accessible animations, and what to eat in Lawrenceville, PA. Links for this episode:Val Head - Designer & Interface Animation ConsultantVal Head (@vlh) | TwitterDesigning Interface Animations | Rosenfeld MediaMotion And Meaning: A podcast about motion design for digital designers with Val Head and Cennydd Bowles.Web Design Day, June 12th 2015 | Pittsburgh, PA Web Design & Development ConferenceDesigning Safer Web Animation For Motion Sensitivity · An A List Apart ArticleUI Animation and UX: A Not-So-Secret Friendship · An A List Apart ArticleMore Resources for Accessible Animations · An A List Apart Blog PostAnimation switchDisney Animation: The Illusion of Life: Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston: 9780896592339: Amazon.com: BooksCSS animations | Five Simple StepsBrought to you by Braintree (To learn more, and for your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go to BraintreePayments.com/BigWebShow), Backblaze (You make sites, protect them! Big Web Show listeners get a two week free trial by going to backblaze.com/bws), and DreamHost (Visit the link to sign up and make sure to use the code THEBIGWEBSHOW395 at checkout and you'll get top rated web hosting for just $3.95/month and a free domain name).
I’ve been looking forward to speaking with Cennydd Bowles for months and for Unfinished Business 113, Cennydd joins me and my other special guest, product designer Noah Stokes. We kick off by talking about Richard Rutter’s web typography book, but soon the conversation switches to whether, and why, current web designs are lacking ‘soul.’ This is something Noah and I have been speaking and writing over recent months and something that I partly blame on our fixation with user-experience and product design. Does Cennydd agree? You‘ll have to listen to the show to find out.
This week we caught up with Cennydd Bowles over Skype for a truly fascinating discussion about cross-OS design, the future of wearables, what it means to be a junior vs. senior designer, and why sound design will be the next big trend.
It's Episode 18 and our book this time around is The Manual Issue 2 by Mark Boulton, Cennydd Bowles, Josh Brewer, Karen Mcgrane, Jon Mcnaught and Trent Walton. (http://www.pagebreakpodcast.com/podcast/18-the-manual-2)
Developing a good set of fundamentals is key to successful user experience design. But if you work for an organization that doesn’t recognize the importance of design, just possessing the skills isn’t enough. It will prove difficult for you to change the company’s culture if they view UX as this huge, disruptive endeavor. Cennydd believes that you can take a lightweight approach to introducing user experience without people realizing that you’re actually doing it.