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Hybrid ship hulls: engineering design rationales / Vladimir M. Shkolnikov, principal investigator

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Dynamic analysis and design of offshore structures / Srinivasan Chandrasekaran

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Analysis and design of marine structures V: proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Marine Structures (MARSTRUCT 2015), Southampton, UK, 25-27 March 2015 / editors C. Guedes Soares, R.A. Shenoi

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Marine structural design calculations / Mohamed A. El-Reedy, Ph.D

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Subsea pipeline design, analysis, and installation Qiang Bai, Yong Bai

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Marine structural design / Yong bia, Wei-Liang Jin

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Hybrid ship hulls: engineering design rationales / Vladimir M. Shkolnikov

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Design principles of ships and marine structures / S.C. Misra

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Marine structural design calculations Mohamed El-Reedy

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Marine structural design calculations / Mohamed A. El-Reedy

Barker Library - TC1665.E47 2015




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Hybrid ship hulls: engineering design rationales / Vladimir M. Shkolnikov

Barker Library - VM162.S55 2014




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Marine structural design / Yong Bai, Wei-Liang Jin

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Design aids of offshore structures under special environmental loads including fire resistance / Srinivasan Chandrasekaran, Gaurav Srivastava

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Marine structural design / Yong Bai, Wei-Liang Jin

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A Holistic Approach to Ship Design. Apostolos Papanikolaou, editor

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Inside pixinsight / Warren A. Keller

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Rare astronomical sights and sounds / Jonathan Powell

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Modeling and analysis of eclipsing binary stars: the theory and design principles of PHOEBE / Andrej Prša

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Flow measurement handbook: industrial designs, operating principles, performance, and applications / Roger C. Baker

Barker Library - TA357.5.M43 B35 2016




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No mercy / Alex De Campi, Carla Speed McNeil, Jenn Manley Lee and Felipe Sobreiro ; with supplemental design by Sasha Head

Hayden Library - PN6728.N6 2015




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Drawn & Quarterly / edited by Tom Devlin [with 4 others] ; designed by Tracy Hurren and Tom Devlin ; translations by Helge Dascher

Rotch Library - PN6732.D73 2015




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Ichi-F: a worker's graphic memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant / Kazuto Tatsuta ; translation: Stephen Paul ; retouching: James Dashiell ; lettering: AndWorld Design

Hayden Library - PN6790.J33 T378513 2017




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Moonshot: the indigenous comics collection / edited by Hope Nicholson ; book layout & design, Andy Stanleigh

Hayden Library - PN6720.M66 2015




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Mobile suit Gundam. story and art, Yasuo Ohtagaki ; original concept by Hajime Yatate and Yoshiyuki Tomino ; translation, Joe Yamazaki ; English adaptation, Stani ; touch-up art & lettering, Evan Waldinger ; cover & design, Shawn Carrico ; editor

Hayden Library - PN6790.J34.K5413 2016




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Reborn / Mark Millar, writer ; Greg Capullo, penciller ; Jonathan Glapion, inker ; Fco Plascencia, colorist ; Nate Piekos of Blambot, lettering/design

Hayden Library - PN6728.R423 M55 2017




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Water and wastewater engineering: design principles and practice / Mackenzie L. Davis

Barker Library - TD345.D36 2020




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Designing Refractive Index Fluids using the Kramers-Kronig Relations

Faraday Discuss., 2020, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/D0FD00027B, Paper
Open Access
Tianqi Sai, Matthias Saba, Eric Dufresne, Ullrich Steiner, Bodo Wilts
For a number of optical applications, it is advantageous to precisely tune the refractive index of a liquid. Here, we harness a well-established concept in optics for this purpose. The...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Design by Nature: Using Universal Forms and Principles in Design

New Peachpit Release Shows How to Create Designs that Appeal to a Worldwide Audience




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Facebook Director of Design Maria Giudice and Startup Mentor Christopher Ireland Write Book on Leadership by Design

Peachpit Publishes Rise of the DEO




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Improving healthcare services: coproduction, codesign and operations / Sharon J. Williams, Lynne Caley

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TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets could harbour significant amounts of water

All seven worlds circling a red dwarf could be habitable, say astronomers




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Trans-inclusive Design

Late one night a few years ago, a panicked professor emailed me: “My transgender student’s legal name is showing on our online discussion board. How can I keep him from being outed to his classmates?” Short story: we couldn’t. The professor created an offline workaround with the student. Years later this problem persists not just in campus systems, but in many systems we use every day.

To anyone who’d call that an unusual situation, it’s not. We are all already designing for trans users—1 in 250 people in the US identifies as transgender or gender non-binary (based on current estimates), and the number is rising.

We are web professionals; we can do better than an offline workaround. The choices we make impact the online and offline experiences of real people who are trans, non-binary, or gender-variant—choices that can affirm or exclude, uplift or annoy, help or harm.

The rest of this article assumes you agree with the concept that trans people are human beings who deserve dignity, respect, and care. If you are seeking a primer on trans-related vocabulary and concepts, please read up and come back later.

I’m going to cover issues touching on content, images, forms, databases, IA, privacy, and AI—just enough to get you thinking about the decisions you make every day and some specific ideas to get you started.

“Tried making a Bitmoji again, but I always get disillusioned immediately by their binary gender model from literally step 1 and end up not using it. I don’t feel represented.”

Editorial note: All personal statements quoted in this article have been graciously shared with the express consent of the original authors.

How we can get things right

Gender is expansively misconstrued as some interchangeable term for anatomical features. Unlike the constellation of human biological forms (our sex), gender is culturally constructed and varies depending on where you are in the world. It has its own diversity.

Asking for gender when it is not needed; limiting the gender options users can select; assuming things about users based on gender; or simply excluding folks from our designs are all ways we reify the man-woman gender binary in design decisions.

Names are fundamentally important

If we do nothing else, we must get names right. Names are the difference between past and present, invalidation and affirmation, and sometimes safety and danger.

Yet, many of the systems we use and create don’t offer name flexibility.

Many programmers and designers have a few misconceptions about names, such as assuming people have one moniker that they go by all the time, despite how common it is for names to change over a lifetime. People might update them after a change in marital status, family situation, or gender, or perhaps someone is known by a nickname, westernized name, or variation on a first name.

In most locales, legally changing names is extremely difficult, extremely expensive, requires medical documentation, or is completely out of the question.

Changes to name and gender marker are even more complicated; they tend to be two separate, long-drawn-out processes. To make matters worse, laws vary from state to state within the U.S. and most only recognize two genders—man and woman—rather than allowing non-binary options.Not all trans people change their names, but for those who do, it’s a serious and significant decision that shouldn’t be sabotaged. We can design systems that protect the lives and privacy of our users, respect the fluid nature of personal identity, and act as an electronic curb cut that helps everyone in the process.

Deadnaming

One need only search Twitter for “deadname app” to get an idea of how apps can leave users in the lurch. Some of the most alarming examples involve apps and sites that facilitate real-life interactions (which already involve a measure of risk for everyone).

“Lyft made it completely impossible for me to change my name on its app even when it was legally changed. I reached out to their support multiple times and attempted to delete the account and start over with no result. I was completely dependent on this service for groceries, appointments, and work, and was emotionally exhausted every single time I needed a ride. I ended up redownloading Uber - even though there was a strike against the service - which I felt awful doing. But Uber allowed me to change my name without any hoops to jump through, so for the sake of my mental health, I had to.”

Trans people are more likely to experience financial hardship, so using payment apps to ask for donations is often necessary. Some of these services may reveal private information as a matter of course, leaving them exposed and potentially at risk.

There are also ramifications when linked services rely on our data sources for name information, instigating an unpredictable cascade effect with little or no recourse to prevent the sharing of sensitive details.

These are examples of deadnaming. Deadnaming is what happens when someone’s previous or birth name is used, rather than the name the person uses now. Deadnaming is invalidating at the least, even as a faux pas, but can be psychologically devastating at the other extreme, even putting lives at risk.The experiences of trans, non-binary, or gender-variant folk can vary widely, and they live in disparate conditions throughout the world. Many are thriving and creating new and joyful ways to resist and undo gender norms, despite the common negative narrative around trans lives. Others can face hardship; trans people are more likely to be unstably housed, underemployed, underpaid, and targets of violence in and out of their homes, workplaces, and intimate relationships. The ramifications are amplified for people of color and those with disabilities, as well as those in precarious living/working situations and environments where exposure can put them in harm’s way.

Design for name changes

Heres what we can do:

Design for renaming. Emma Humphries’ talk on renaming covers this nicely. Airbnb has developed policies and procedures for users who’ve transitioned, allowing users to keep their review histories intact with amended names and/or pronouns.

Get rid of “real name” requirements. Allow people to use names they go by rather than their legal first names.

Clarify when you actually need a legal name, and only use that in conjunction with a display name field.

Have a name change process that allows users to change their names without legal documentation. (It’s likely that you have procedures for marriage-related name changes already.)

Ensure users can still change their display names when connecting with other data sources to populate users’ names.

Don’t place onerous restrictions on changes. Once someone creates a username, web address, or profile URL, allow them to change it.

Draft a code of conduct if you’re part of an online community, and make sure to include policies around deadnaming. Twitter banned deadnaming last year.

Allow people to be forgotten. When people delete their accounts for whatever reason, help them make sure that their data is not lingering in your systems or in other places online.

Update the systems users don’t see, too

Identity management systems can be a mess, and name changes can reveal the failures among those systems, including hidden systems that users don’t see.

One Twitter user’s health insurance company kept their ID number between jobs but changed their gender. Another user updated their display name but got an email confirmation addressed to their legal name.

Hidden information can also undermine job opportunities:

“At a university as a student, I transitioned and changed my name and gender to be a woman. TWELVE YEARS later after being hired to work in the Libraries, the Libraries HR coordinator emailed me that I was listed as male still in the database. He changed it on my asking, but I have to wonder how long… was it a factor in my being turned down for jobs I applied to… who had seen that..?”

Emma Humphries details the hidden systems that can carry out-of-date information about users. Her tips for database design include:

  • Don’t use emails as unique IDs.
  • Use an invariant user ID internally, and link the user’s current email and display name to it.

Images

Visuals should allow room for representation and imagination rather than a narrow subset of the usual suspects: figures who appear to be straight, cisgender, able-bodied, and white/Caucasian.

What we can do is feature a variety of gender presentations, as well as not assume someone’s gender identity if they buy certain items.

Some companies, like Wildfang and Thinx, offer a broad array of images representing different races, body sizes, and gender expressions on their websites and in their ads.

Many are also choosing not to hire models, allowing room for imagination and versatility:

“I got a catalog for a ‘classic menswear company’ that features zero photos of any person of any gender. Now if only I could afford an $800 blazer...”

Here's what we can do:

Actively recruit diverse groups of models for photos. And pay them!

If you can’t shoot your own photos, Broadly has recently launched a trans-inclusive stock photo collection free for wide use. Avataaars allows users to create an avatar without selecting a gender.

Information architecture

How we organize information is a political act and a non-neutral decision (librarians have said this for a while). This applies to gender-based classifications.

Many companies that sell consumer goods incorporate gender into their product design and marketing, no matter what. The product itself might be inherently gender-neutral (such as clothing, toys, bikes, or even wine), but these design and marketing decisions can directly impact the information architecture of websites.

Here's what we can do:

Evaluate why any menus, categories, or tags are based on gender, and how it can be done differently:

“Nike has a ‘gender neutral’ clothing category, yet it’s listed under ‘men’ and ‘women’ in the website architecture. ????”

Forms

Forms, surveys, and other types of data gathering are surefire ways to include or exclude people. If you ask for information you don’t need or limit the options that people can select, you risk losing them as users.

Here's what we can do:

Critically evaluate why you are asking for personal information, including gender. Will that information be used to help someone, or sell things to your advertisers?

"Why does the @CocaCola site make me select a gender just to make a purchase? Guess my family isn't getting personalized Coke bottles for Christmas."

If you are asking users for their gender, you’d better have a good reason and options that include everyone. A gender field should have more than two options, or should ask for pronouns instead. When including more than binary options, actually record the selections in your databases instead of reclassifying answers as male/female/null, otherwise you risk losing trust when disingenuous design decisions become public.

Honorifics are infrequently used these days, but it takes little work to add gender-inclusive titles to a list. For English-language sites, “Mx.” can go alongside “Mr.” and “Ms.” without fuss. United Airlines debuted this option earlier this year.

Content

Here's what we can do:

Avoid inappropriately gendered language. Your style guide should include singular “they” instead of “he/she” or “s/he,” and exclude frequently used words and phrases that exclude trans folks. Resources such as this transgender style guide are a quick way to check your language and benchmark your own content guidelines.

Check assumptions about gender and biology. Not everyone who can have a period, can get pregnant, or can breastfeed identifies as women or mothers—just as not everyone who identifies as women or mothers can have periods, can get pregnant, or can breastfeed. Thinx, a company that sells period underwear, has an inclusive tagline: “For people with periods.”

Avoid reinforcing the binary. Groups of people aren’t “ladies and gentlemen” or “boys and girls.” They are folks, people, colleagues, “y’all,” or even “all y’all.”

Pronouns aren’t “preferred”—they’re just pronouns. Calling pronouns preferred suggests that they’re optional and are replacing a “true” pronoun.

Avoid reinforcing stereotypes about trans people. Not all trans people are interested in medically transitioning, or in “passing.” They also aren’t fragile or in need of a savior. Gender is separate from sexual orientation. You can’t “tell” someone is trans.

Privacy, surveillance, and nefarious AI

We’ve heard the story of algorithms identifying a pregnant teen before her parents knew. What if an algorithm predicts or reveals information about your gender identity?

Inferences. Users’ genders are assumed based on their purchase/browsing history.

Recommendations. A user bought something before they transitioned and it shows up in “recommended because you bought X.”

Predictions. Users’ genders are not only inferred but used to predict something else based on characteristics of that gender. Even if you don’t tell big websites what your gender is, they assume one for you based on your interests. That kind of reductive essentialism can harm people of all genders. One of this article’s peer readers summed this up:

“Gender markers are a poor proxy for tastes. I like dresses, cute flats, and Raspberry Pis.”

Flashbacks. “On this day” algorithms remind users of the past, sometimes for better (“I’ve come so far”) or for worse (“don’t remind me”).

AI-based discrimination

AI and surveillance software can also reinforce norms about what men’s and women’s bodies should look like, resulting in harrowing airline travel experiences and creating AI-based discrimination for trans people.

So, too, can trans folks’ public data be used for projects that they don’t consent to. Just because we can use AI for something—like determining gender based on a face scan—doesn’t mean we should.

Here's what we can do:

Read up and proactively mitigate bias. AI and algorithms can reflect developers’ biases and perpetuate stereotypes about how people’s bodies should look. Use AI to challenge the gender binary rather than reinforce it. Design for privacy first. Hire more types of people who represent different lived experiences.

Toward a gender-inclusive web

The ideas I’ve offered here are only starting points. How you choose to create space for trans folks is going to be up to you. I don’t have all the solutions here, and there is no singular trans experience. Also, language, definitions, and concepts change rapidly.

We shouldn’t use any of these facts as excuses to keep us from trying.

When we start to think about design impact on trans folks, the ideas we bring into question can benefit everyone. Our designs should go beyond including—they should affirm and validate. Ideally, they will also reflect organizational cultures that support diversity and inclusion.

Here's what we can do:

Keep learning. Learn how to be a good ally. Pay trans user research participants to help validate your design assumptions. Hire trans people on your team and don't hang them out to dry or make them do all the hard work around inclusion and equity. Make it everyone’s job to build a more just web and world for everybody.

Editorial note: All personal statements quoted in this article have been graciously shared with the express consent of the original authors.

This article is stronger and wiser thanks to Mica McPheeters at A List Apart and the following peer readers. Thank you.

Jake Atchison
Katherine Deibel, Ph.D.
Justina F. Hall
Austyn Higgs
Emma Humphries
Tara Robertson
Levi R. Walter




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Daily Ethical Design

Suddenly, I realized that the people next to me might be severely impacted by my work. I was having a quick lunch in the airport. A group of flight attendants sat down at the table next to me and started to prepare for their flight. For a while now, our design team had been working on futuristic concepts for the operations control center of these flight attendants’ airline, pushing ourselves to come up with innovative solutions enabled by the newest technologies. As the control center deals with all activities around flying planes, our concepts touched upon everything and everyone within the airline. How was I to know what the impact of my work would be on the lives of these flight attendants? And what about the lives of all the other people working at the airline? Ideally, we would have talked to all the types of employees in the company and tested our concepts with them. But, of course, there was no budget (or time) allocated to do so, not to mention we faced the hurdle of convincing (internal) stakeholders of the need. Not for the first time, I felt frustrated: practical, real-world constraints prevented me from assessing the impact and quality of my work. They prevented me from properly conducting ethical design.

What is ethical design?

Right, good question. A very comprehensive definition of ethical design can be found at Encyclopedia.com:
Design ethics concerns moral behavior and responsible choices in the practice of design. It guides how designers work with clients, colleagues, and the end users of products, how they conduct the design process, how they determine the features of products, and how they assess the ethical significance or moral worth of the products that result from the activity of designing.
In other words, ethical design is about the “goodness”—in terms of benefit to individuals, society, and the world—of how we collaborate, how we practice our work, and what we create. There’s never a black-and-white answer for whether design is good or bad, yet there are a number of areas for designers to focus on when considering ethics.

Usability

Nowadays usability has conquered a spot as a basic requirement for each interface; unusable products are considered design failures. And rightly so; we have a moral obligation as designers to create products that are intuitive, safe, and free from possibly life-threatening errors. We were all reminded of usability’s importance by last year’s accidental nuclear strike warning in Hawaii. What if, instead of a false-positive, the operator had broadcasted a false-negative?

Accessibility

Like usability, inclusive design has become a standard item in the requirement list of many designers and companies. (I will never forget that time someone tried to use our website with a screen reader—and got absolutely stuck at the cookie message.) Accessible design benefits all, as it attempts to cover as many needs and capabilities as possible. Yet for each design project, there are still a lot of tricky questions to answer. Who gets to benefit from our solutions? Who is (un)intentionally left out? Who falls outside the “target customer segment”?

Privacy

Another day, another Facebook privacy scandal. As we’re progressing into the Data Age, the topic of privacy has become almost synonymous with design ethics. There’s a reason why more and more people use DuckDuckGo as an alternative search engine to Google. Corporations have access to an abundance of personal information about consumers, and as designers we have the privilege—and responsibility—of using this information to shape products and services. We have to consider how much information is strictly necessary and how much people are willing to give up in exchange for services. And how can we make people aware of the potential risks without overloading them?

User involvement

Overlapping largely with privacy, this focus area is about how we deal with our users and what we do with the data that we collect from them. IDEO has recently published The Little Book of Design Research Ethics, which provides a comprehensive overview of the core principles and guidelines we should follow when conducting design research.

Persuasion

Ethics related to persuasion is about to what extent we may influence the behavior and thoughts of our users. It doesn’t take much to bring acceptable, “white hat” persuasion into gray or even dark territories. Conversion optimization, for example, can easily turn into “How do we squeeze out more revenue from our customers by turning their unconsciousness against them?” Prime examples include Netflix, which convinces us to watch, watch, and watch even more, and Booking.com, which barrages our senses with urgency and social pressure.

Focus

The current digital landscape is addictive, distracting, and competing for attention. Designing for focus is about responsibly handling people’s most valuable resource: time. Our challenge is to limit everything that disrupts our users’ attention, lower the addictiveness of products, and create calmness. The Center for Humane Technology has started a useful list of resources for this purpose.

Sustainability

What’s the impact of our work on the world’s environment, resources, and climate? Instead of continuously adding new features in the unrelenting scrum treadmill, how could we design for fewer? We’re in the position to create responsible digital solutions that enable sustainable consumer behavior and prevent overconsumption. For example, apps such as Optimiam and Too Good To Go allow people to order leftover food that would normally be thrashed. Or consider Mutum and Peerby, whose peer-to-peer platforms promote the sharing and reuse of owned products.

Society

The Ledger of Harms of the Center for Human Technology is a work-in-progress collection of the negative impacts that digital technology has on society, including topics such as relationships, mental health, and democracy. Designers who are mindful of society consider the impact of their work on the global economy, communities, politics, and health.
[caption id="attachment_7171650" align="alignnone" width="1200"] The focus areas of design ethics. That’s a lot to consider![/caption]

Ethics as an inconvenience

Ideally, in every design project, we should assess the potential impact in all of the above-mentioned areas and take steps to prevent harm. Yet there are many legitimate, understandable reasons why we often neglect to do so. It’s easy to have moral principles, yet in the real world, with the constraints that our daily life imposes upon us, it’s seldom easy to act according to those principles. We might simply say it’s inconvenient at the moment. That there’s a lack of time or budget to consider all the ethical implications of our work. That there are many more pressing concerns that have priority right now. We might genuinely believe it’s just a small issue, something to consider later, perhaps. Mostly, we are simply unaware of the possible consequences of our work. And then there’s the sheer complexity of it all: it’s simply too much to simultaneously focus on. When short on time, or in the heat of approaching deadlines and impatient stakeholders, how do you incorporate all of design ethics’ focus areas? Where do you even start?

Ethics as a structural practice

For these reasons, I believe we need to elevate design ethics to a more practical level. We need to find ways to make ethics not an afterthought, not something to be considered separately, but rather something that’s so ingrained in our process that not doing it means not doing design at all. The only way to overcome the “inconvenience” of acting ethically is to practice daily ethical design: ethics structurally integrated in our daily work, processes, and tools as designers. No longer will we have to rely on the exceptions among us; those extremely principled who are brave enough to stand up against the system no matter what kind of pressure is put upon them. Because the system will be on our side. By applying ethics daily and structurally in our design process, we’ll be able to identify and neutralize in a very early stage the potential for mistakes and misuse. We’ll increase the quality of our design and our practices simply because we’ll think things through more thoroughly, in a more conscious and structured manner. But perhaps most important is that we’ll establish a new standard for design. A standard that we can sell to our clients as the way design should be done, with ethical design processes and deliverables already included. A standard that can be taught to design students so that the newest generation of designers doesn’t know any better than to apply ethics, always.

How to practice daily ethical design?

At this point we’ve arrived at the question of how we can structurally integrate ethics into our design process. How do we make sure that our daily design decisions will result in a product that’s usable and accessible; protects people’s privacy, agency, and focus; and benefits both society and nature? I want to share with you some best practices that I’ve identified so far, and how I’ve tried to apply them during a recent project at Mirabeau. The goal of the project was to build a web application that provides a shaver manufacturer’s factory workers insight into the real-time availability of production materials.

Connect to your organization’s mission and values

By connecting our designs to the mission and values of the companies we work for, we can structurally use our design skills in a strategic manner, for moral purposes. We can challenge the company to truly live up to its promises and support it in carrying out its mission. This does, however, require you to be aware of the company’s values, and to compare these to your personal values. As I had worked with our example client before, I knew it was a company that takes care of its employees and has a strong focus on creating a better world. During the kick-off phase, we used a strategy pyramid to structure the client’s mission and values, and to agree upon success factors for the project. We translated the company’s customer-facing brand guidelines to employee-focused design principles that maintained the essence of the organization.

Keep track of your assumptions

Throughout our entire design process, we make assumptions for each decision that we take. By structurally keeping track of these assumptions, you’ll never forget about the limitations of your design and where the potential risks lie in terms of (harmful) impact on users, the project, the company, and society. In our example project, we listed our assumptions about user goals, content, and functionalities for each page of the application. If we were not fully sure about the value for end users, or the accuracy of a user goal, we marked it as a value assumption. When we were unsure if data could be made available, we marked this as a data (feasibility) assumption. If we were not sure whether a feature would add to the manufacturer’s business, we marked it as a scope assumption. Every week, we tested our assumptions with end users and business stakeholders through user tests and sprint demos. Each design iteration led to new questions and assumptions to be tested the next week.

Aim to be proven wrong

While our assumptions are the known unknowns, there are always unknown unknowns that we aren’t aware of but could be a huge risk for the quality and impact of our work. The only way we can identify these is by applying the scientific principle of falsifiability: seeking actively to be proven wrong. Only outsiders can point out to us what we miss as an individual or as a team. In our weekly user tests, we included factory workers and stakeholders with different disciplines, from different departments, and working in different contexts, to identify the edge cases that could break our concept. On one occasion, this made us reconsider the entirety of our concept. Still, we could have done better: although scalability to other factories was an important success factor, we were unable to gather input from those other factories during the project. We felt our only option was to mention this as a risk (“limit to scalability”).

Use the power of checklists

Let’s face it: we forget things. (Without scrolling up the page, can you name all the focus areas of design ethics?) This is where checklists help us out: they provide knowledge in the world, so that we don’t have to process it in our easily overwhelmed memory. Simple yet powerful, a checklist is an essential tool to practice daily ethical design. In our example project, we used checklists to maintain an overview of questions and assumptions to user test, checking whether we included our design principles properly, and assessing whether we complied to the client’s values, design principles, and the agreed-upon success factors. In hindsight, we could also have taken a moment during the concept phase to go through the list of focus areas for design ethics, as well as have taken a more structural approach to check accessibility guidelines.

The main challenge for daily ethical design

Most ethics focus areas are quite tangible, where design decisions have immediate, often visible effects. While certainly challenging in their own right, they’re relatively easy to integrate in our daily practice, especially for experienced designers. Society and the environment, however, are more intangible topics; the effects of our work in these areas are distant and uncertain. I’m sure that when Airbnb was first conceived, the founders did not consider the magnitude of its disruptive impact on the housing market. The same goes for Instagram, as its role in creating demand for fast fashion must have been hard to foresee. Hard, but not impossible. So how do we overcome this challenge and make the impact that we have on society and the environment more immediate, more daily?

Conduct Dark Reality sessions

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates used a series of questions to gradually uncover the invalidity of people’s beliefs. In a very similar way, we can uncover the assumptions and potential disastrous consequences of our concepts in a ‘Dark Reality’ session, a form of speculative design that focuses on stress-testing a concept with challenging questions. We have to ask ourselves—or even better, somebody outside our team has to ask us— questions such as, “What is the lifespan of your product? What if the user base will be in the millions? What are the long-term effects on economy, society, and the environment? Who benefits from your design? Who loses? Who is excluded? And perhaps most importantly, how could your design be misused? (For more of these questions, Alan Cooper provided a great list in his keynote at Interaction 18.) The back-and-forth Q&A of the Dark Reality session will help us consider and identify our concept’s weaknesses and potential consequences. As it is a team effort, it will spark discussion and uncover differences in team members’ ethical values. Moreover, the session will result in a list of questions and assumptions that can be tested with potential users and subject matter experts. In the project for the airline control center, it resulted in more consideration for the human role in automatization and how digital interfaces can continue to support human capabilities (instead of replacing them), and reflection on the role of airports in future society. The dark reality session is best conducted during the convergent parts of the double diamond, as these are the design phases in which we narrow down to realistic ideas. It’s vital to have a questioner from outside the team with strong interviewing skills and who doesn’t easily accept an answer as sufficient. There are helpful tools available to help structure the session, such as the Tarot Cards of Tech and these ethical tools.

Take a step back to go forward

As designers, we’re optimists by nature. We see the world as a set of problems that we can solve systematically and creatively if only we try hard enough. We intend well. However, merely having the intention to do good is not going to be enough. Our mindset comes with the pitfall of (dis)missing potential disastrous consequences, especially under pressure of daily constraints. That’s why we need to regularly, systematically take a step back and consider the future impact of our work. My hope is that the practical, structural mindset to ethics introduced in this article will help us agree on a higher standard for design.




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Take the MDN Developer & Designer Needs Survey

Today, MDN announced their first-ever needs assessment survey for web developers and designers. The survey takes about 20 minutes and asks a variety of questions aimed at understanding the joys, frustrations, needs and wants of everyday web-makers. Mozilla have committed to making the results of the survey public later this year, and the survey itself […]




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The ethical algorithm: the science of socially aware algorithm design / Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth

Dewey Library - HC79.I55 K43 2020




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Divorce in Europe: New Insights in Trends, Causes and Consequences of Relation Break-ups / edited by Dimitri Mortelmans

Online Resource




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Ascott’s signature projects in India

Ascott’s signature projects in India




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Plant Design Suite

Plant Design Suite




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Infrastructure Design Suite

Infrastructure Design Suite




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Autodesk Building Design Suite

Autodesk Building Design Suite




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Steel Design and Fabrication

Steel Design and Fabrication




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Seismic Design of Structures

Seismic Design of Structures




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National Design Award of the Institution of Engineers

National Design Award of the Institution of Engineers




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Design of Piles

Design of Piles




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Dr. Manmohan sigh

Dr. Manmohan sigh




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Project Designing

Project Designing




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Graduate Design Engineer

Graduate Design Engineer




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Central Mine Planning and Design Institute

Central Mine Planning and Design Institute




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Water Sensitive Urban Design

Water Sensitive Urban Design




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Designing heavy commercial vehicles for Indian roads

Designing heavy commercial vehicles for Indian roads