The core problem that I wrote in the SOP that is the subject of this thesis are the "inscription errors of unconscious human bias.

Living and working in Silicon Valley from 2009 - 2018, I had front row tickets to the tech industry's innovation and disruption.

When I left, Silicon Valley politics became inter/national politics.

The timeline shows a sample of major events during this time, including my own company's acquisition by ARM Holding as part of their device-to-data IoT strategy.

Media has the capacity to provide information at the collective level, but can also cause hysteria. Both has gone up over time as tech draws national attention.

The information reported are usually outcomes and effects, not causes, which means public literacy of technology does not increase. Attitude towards tech also becomes increasingly negative, which creates a potential risk of scapegoating.

As governments respond to problems, the regulations are not designed with technology in mind. A case study is the consent form now on every website which do not benefit the public and are only for companies to protect themselves.

Since there is an obvious problem, people want to step in and help. Others, including academics, want to step in and capitalize on a hot moment (Floridi). This creates an influx of information and can lead to ethics-washing (Floridi). Technologists may be caught in a vicious cycle of scapegoating which is, ironically, unethical.

Misfit regulations can also lead to infrastructural bloat which can impact future use cases, particularly in domains of healthcare and climate change, in unknown ways.

I selected a Series B Start-Up in the middle of scaling as a model for my systems map. agile management, design thinking, and quality management frameworks were synthesized into a diagram.

Following Conway's Law, I assessed for gaps in information and communication, then identified where and how bias / insensitivities might enter the system to cause ethical problems. I also identified bugs / deviations / and inconsistencies to be a source of ethical risks due to their impact on the user experience.

Ethics is concept understood and manifested in different ways. Some are implicit, others are explicit. Understanding what is ethical is also not distributed evenly as individuals always have their own perspectives and understanding of the world. The culture of an organization also varies as leaders influence individuals by modeling appropriate behavior.

In being a parafiction, designs can engage with problems at a technical fidelity that matches the discourse it hopes to influence by being credible to a broader audience. While still narrative-driven, the way the story is told exceeds a cinematic speculative design which provides a compelling narrative surface but is unhinged from the technical present.

As an interactive object from an alternate future, the platform could transition into the real provided a buyer or user comes into being. In this way it also engages in design futures and strategic forecasting. Not cordoned off as an alternate reality, its persistence in meatspace retains a meaningful change-making ability.

The platform is designed to be applicable to any domain problem.

In the following prototype, it is looking at the domain of digital education (MOOCs), but it can also be applied to affordable housing, criminal justice, etc.

The concept of an ethical protocol generalized the different ways that ethics manifested in textual documents into a common object that could bridge between stakeholders in different institutions.

Ethical protocols would also serve to normalize the set of words and their referents into a coherent namespace by pairing lexons (internal vocabulary) with keywords (external vocabulary). As a data object that packaged relevant information, protocols could be traced and a digital space for institutional stakeholders was created for data governance.

As a common object, protocols act as a bridge between stakeholders in different institutions.

A new role was created for the primary user / change-maker: a lawyer from the future. The platform sought to create communication channels for this lawyer to interact with the product design team.

Onboarding is critical to the success of employees / users and organizational leadership by providing steps for transition into the product.

The landing page of Origo bootstraps the user requirements-gathering process by asking them to define their jurisdiction and anchoring the product in a context and culture.

It then creates a boundary object by visualizing the data model, and directs users to a glossary to give them a common vocabulary for discussion.

The glossary lays out my synthesis of over five years of practice-based research on designing data models, all brought into the creation of this parafictional platform for ontological design.

For clarity and ease of learning, the glossary eschews the production of new marketing / self-marketing terms to describe what has already been described in other fields to produce a unified vocabulary.

This aids in the creation of a shared multi-disciplinary framework, reduces silos, improves collaboration, and helps in the search for more information.

The lawyer develops a domain ontology of concept. The ontology unifies namespaces across multiple concepts. In a unified view, it also counters the problem of jurisdictional fragmentation that comes with intersecting local, state, and government laws by serving as a boundary object at the macro-level.

The ontology can also provide a view into optimizing laws created for a common problem by detecting patterns and reverse salients across and within jurisdictions. Over time, data governance can be complex without being complicated.

As feedback with product team are maintained, the ontology can also serve as aa data collection mechanism for experiments that might be generalized into new laws.

Where the ontology exists for lawyers at the macro-scale, the data model exists for product teams at the mezzo-scale and provides a space for designing data representations where questions of identity, meaning, and semantics need to be discussed.

Given that much of the cost of UX designs are due to architectural changes needed because impedance mismatches, the data model also aids engineers in planning and making trade-offs for product development.

By making a technical object legible, non-technical stakeholders can participate in problem-spotting and designing data.

By abstracting data away from interface, designers can make more conscious design decisions.

The systems map traces information from outside to inside the product at the global, local, and structural level to show how feedback loops can be constructed to counter the ones created by the media, while working cooperatively with governance.

The devil is in the details. This is the same for data ethics. The visualization is created to surface properties of data relevant to decision-making.

By surfacing this within the product, it also passively educates less data-savvy stakeholders on the nuances of data.

Many activities occur around the data model. Different views are created of its surface for different interactive purposes.

Visualizing the data model also creates a simple chart of all its keywords.

Properties of the keywords relevant to ethical decision-making are also visualized / surfaced.

October 2024

Ethical product development is an emergent and ongoing process. What is good / bad, better / worse, right / wrong changes over time as culture and norms change. Inherently non-deterministic and stochastic, it is necessary to think of ethics beyond governance, and as a set of values that should be brought forth in the world. The latter needs to come first; compliance, though necessary as a mechanism of enforcement, encourages laziness. Human-centered designers know the pitfalls of a checklist.

As an executive I interviewed said succinctly: ethics is a choice. It is not abstract but manifested in the everyday actions of people saying words and making things with decisions. Ethics is embodied. Those who objectify ethics in judgment ossify its evolution and risk becoming the very problem they hope to prevent. While this is a project about words, it starts with process, with the how, because this is what gives ethics movement. The words will always be incomplete; they will always betray you. They betray you faster when the speaker is unreliable and when the thing is invisible. Designers of the built environment know that a map is not the world.

Community, on the other hand, is deeply human. Creating it requires critical thinking and dialogue, the same basic skills needed for a functioning democracy. The words need to connect and land. If the search for an ethics is a pursuit of justice, this project stakes a claim that justice is a living thing: it emerges in and through the words we share with each other. May it always bend towards good.