Epilogue: Designing for Good

image

What responsibility do interaction designers have for what they design? Some designers think that the products and services they create are morally neutral, that users themselves and society, not the designer, should determine how a product should be used. But what if the user’s task is to injure someone? Or if the system being designed helps people do harm?

The book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black relates the story of a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, who, in August 1943, arrived at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz as a prisoner. There, the Nazis assigned him a five-digit IBM Hollerith number, ...

Get Designing for Interaction: Creating Innovative Applications and Devices, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.