With the summer holiday over for some of us, it’s time to start looking towards the second half of 2022.
Our (growing — whoop) Ethical Design Network is gearing up with some new initiatives — one being announced in this newsletter — and we’re super excited to keep you up-to-date.
In this newsletter you can find news about ED Network’s own events, resources about the ongoing fight against deceptive design, and what’s happening in the community.
This month’s newsletter is written by ED Network founder Trine Falbe and Jarijn Nijkamp.
Free online event: Cookieless websites
Our upcoming August event is a fireside chat with Maria Arango Kure from Doing Well & Good about building cookieless websites.
We’ll discuss the alternatives we have for achieving the performance and gathering the insights we need, without infringing on our audiences’ privacy.
The event takes place online Monday 29th of August at 6 to 7PM CET.
We’re winning the fight against deceptive design!
The digital space has always been know to be infected with deceptive design — design patterns aimed to make people do things they didn’t intend to.
Just think of that newsletter you don’t recall signing up to, or the price mysteriously increasing the second time you search for a flight ticket. That’s deceptive design.
But the days of deceptive design seem to be coming to an end.
2022 looks to be the year when societal pressure, new legislation and the work of interest groups finally is making the right amount of impact.
Want to know how it’s happened? Then read on!
Digital Services Act
Taking effect no later than January 2024, The Digital Services Act is designed to create a safer and more open digital space for all users, where their fundamental rights are protected and where they have access to quality digital services at lower prices.
This is a huge step forward to mitigate the unethical design that exists not just on the very large platforms, but in digital services on all scales.
A few aspects that DSA will improve for EU consumers (source):
- Ban of unfair practices, opening up the possibility for business users to offer consumers more choices of innovative services
- Better interoperability with services that are alternatives to those of gatekeepers
- Easier possibilities for consumers to switch platforms if they wish so
- Better services and lower prices for consumers
With legislation finally catching up to the digital industry’s practices, it’s safe to say that it’s time for businesses who have European customers to pay attention. As we say in The Ethical Design Handbook: Time works in favor for ethical design.
New Dutch legislation
On the 28th of May 2022 ACM (The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets) enforced stricter rules for online sellers in The Netherlands in order to better protect consumers in the digital economy.
For online sellers, it means that posting fake reviews will be prohibited, and personalised offerings and pricing will need to be clearly labelled as such. Regulation related to was/now prices are expected to take effect later in the year.
As a result, it was recently announced that the platform Wish will now ban personalised pricing and fake discounts. Read the full story here
The World Wide Web Foundation
The World Wide Web Foundation was established in 2009 by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Rosemary Leith to advance the open web as a public good and a basic right. One of the many projects the Foundation runs is the Fight against Deceptive Design under the Tech Policy Design Lab Initiative
which is making significant progress in mitigating deceptive design on the web.
Consequence scanning – an agile practice for responsible innovators
If you work with design on a strategic level, you may have been in situations where decisions weren’t properly challenged. And as a consequence, products were shipped that ultimately shouldn’t have.
That’s where consequence scanning can be of help. It’s a framework to help organisations think about the potential impact of their product or service on people and society.
With Consequence Scanning, organisations will be able to anticipate and address concerns they might have early on in the development cycle, before the final product is shipped.
Read more about the framework and download the manual
New addition to The Ethical Design Network: A book club!
We’ve had members express interest in a book club in the network. The wonderful Lexi Namer, Jonathan Wigmans and Andreas Wolters have been kind to take that idea and run with it, and we’re proud to announce our first book club meeting on Tuesday, August 30 at 11AM ET / 3PM GMT.
To join the book club, sign up to our our Slack workspace and join the #book-club channel.
25% discount on online tickets:
UX Nordic (24-26 August 2022)
UX Nordic is a sponsor of the Ethical Design Network, and they have generously offered a 25% discount on online tickets to the everybody who receives our newsletter.
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