Seeking contacts for Asia tour, spring 2020
Update: thanks for sharing, everyone, but I decided to decline the trip. I can’t justify the carbon emissions. Some other time, perhaps.
I’ve been invited to give a high-profile talk in Singapore. Since this trip would use up a large chunk of my 2020 CO₂ budget, if I accept I’m thinking of staying in Southeast & East Asia for a few weeks to combine other visits and work. (More on carbon budgeting and reduction another time, but essentially: cluster trips to sharply reduce long-haul flights, prioritise low-carbon local transit.)
I want to expand my global network, learn more about the direction of design in Asia (and shift my perspectives away from Western/US technocentrism), and if possible get a little paid work to help fund the trip. So I’m looking to connect with:
individuals pushing the frontiers of digital design, and people active in the areas of tech ethics, responsible technology, privacy, and speculative design/futures design/etc. Let’s chat over a coffee, or local equivalent.
teams & companies that could benefit from a talk or a workshop (ethics, futures design) about these issues. Could be client-side design, product, or engineering teams, or consulting groups in the tech space. Local or multinational both fine, so long as English isn’t a problem.
When and how?
I expect to be in the region late March through April 2020. Right now I’m looking at Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, China, and/or Japan as destinations; I’m open to others if schedule permits. This is likely to be my only Southeast & East Asia trip for some time. Please email if you’d like to make contact: cennydd@cennydd.com.
Who am I?
I’m a digital product designer and futurist, formerly of Twitter, and author of the book Future Ethics. My focus these days is on designing ethical and responsible technology, addressing the climate crisis, and helping companies adopt futures thinking and speculative design to think more constructively about our shared futures.
Poachers turned gamekeepers
A colleague & friend wrote to me about the ongoing Silicon Valley contrition exhibition: ‘I feel like I'm seeing more and more of these kinds of mea culpas popping up of late, and am struggling with how to interpret them.’ Struck me that my reply might be worth publishing (lightly edited):
Yeah, I see a lot of these too and share your cynicism. I see it as a way for techies to earn a second bite at the cherry: I built this, we fucked it up, but now I’m sorry, so that’s fine. It’s no accident that Wetherell is ‘cofounder of a yet-unannounced startup’ – that’s why he gave the interview, surely, to build relevance and buzz? Here’s Vice Motherboard’s take on it.
I see this outflanking move most egregiously with the persuasive design crew. For around a decade, people like Nir Eyal have been advising companies on how to manipulate cognitive weakness to sell more product; now, in the backlash era, they’ve pivoted into these awful poacher-turned-gamekeeper roles: “I know all the evil tricks companies use, so hire me to help you do all this *ethically*.” TBH I think the industry should show these people the door; they had their chance, and they blew it. I wouldn’t even complain if someone made that conclusion about me, too.
There is, as you say, a potential upside, namely that these can be positive examples, fables of thoughtless design that come back to bite the companies involved. But I mostly read these sob stories as techdudes attempting to cling to power and relevance, now they see the pitchforks on the horizon.
Building Better Worlds video online
Video of my new talk Building Better Worlds is now available. The most important talk I’ve given, pleading for new speculative, future-conscious, hopeful modes of design that contest our slide into climate ruin. Please share & let me know your thoughts.
I’ve also published the notes, slides, evidence, and credit for the talk. One erratum to the video: the idea that ‘winning slowly is the same as losing’ on climate comes from Bill McKibben, rather than Alex Steffen.
My thanks to the Camp Digital crew for the invitation, and to the many people whose work inspired the talk.
Future Ethics flash sale
I’m having a flash sale on Future Ethics. The digital edition – PDF, Kindle, ePub – is now $9 (plus VAT for EU customers), and I’ve a few signed paperbacks available for £9.99 (update: sorry, these are now sold out). Amazon prices have also come down.
Prices will go back up at midday on Thursday 9 May, so move fast.
Future Ethics workshop coming to Amsterdam
Since I started offering my new workshop Practical Ethics for Tech Teams, I’ve had quite a few people ask whether I would be holding any public sessions. Good news! In collaboration with The Master Workshop, I’ll be running the workshop in Amsterdam on 20 September (under the title Future Ethics in Technology). Learn about the three lenses of contemporary ethics, use them in lively debates about emerging technology, and apply what you’ve learned through practical, hands-on exercises and games. Early-bird tickets are available now, at a very reasonable €329.
Full details, agenda, and sample slides here: https://www.themasterworkshop.com/cennydd-bowles
Trip to Beer Temple afterwards entirely optional, but recommended. Hope to see you there.
Speculative design’s tricky future
Great piece from Tobias Revell about the wrinkles in the speculative design bedsheets: Five Problems with Speculative Design.
I have a hunch that speculative design is the next big thing, on the brink of being seized and pillaged by the digital design community. Like Tobias I worry that this process will strip away all critical angles. Without criticality, speculative design is just an anodyne horizon-stretching exercise. Vision videos, office workers moving banal UI around glass walls. A mildly useful adjunct to affirmative #ShipIt design, but saying nothing about morality, inequities, etc.
Or perhaps we’ll swing the other way, and churn out rote make-u-think dystopias that deepen designers’ reputations as obstructionists, wolf-criers, and general pains in the collective ass.
Either way, we’d squander the true power of speculative design, which IMO is to engage a diverse public in tough discussions about our futures, and to spread power from technocrats to the people. It’s not about promoting corporate goals or our own pet narratives.
Ethics Should Not Be A Luxury
New article, by me: ‘Ethics Should Not Be A Luxury’: a lament on how ethical products are commonly marketed as luxury goods, and how this hampers genuine, structural change. https://ethical.net/ethical/ethics-should-not-be-a-luxury/
Happy to have this piece published by ethical.net, a London-based non-profit doing the hard work of aggregating ethical alternatives. Think they’re trending on Product Hunt today too. Worth a look.
Evolving Digital Self podcast
For your Friday enjoyment: I was a guest on Heidi Forbes Öste’s Evolving Digital Self podcast, discussing where tech regulation might go next, what happens when global techno-utopian dreams meet nationalistic sentiment, and moving from user-centricity to community-centricity. Listen below or subscribe on iTunes.
New workshop: Practical Ethics for Tech Teams
I talk about ethics with lots of designers, PMs, and tech leaders; they usually say the topic feels important but shapeless. They need practical tips on anticipating harms and unintended consequences, on getting past gut feel to make a compelling case for doing the right thing.
Of course, I think I can help. So I’ve created a new workshop, Practical Ethics for Tech Teams. I ran it for the first time last week with a private client. Here’s what they said:
‘Brilliant. Just so relevant and thought provoking and practical and a masterclass in facilitation. Left feeling very grateful for the work you’ve done, and for making it so accessible to us.’
‘It was BLOODY brilliant! Thank you. Very interesting and engaging.’
‘The exercises, they were all fantastic. Especially the proxemic & mutually destructive [metrics]: so much from them that I can actually apply. Thank you!’
Looks like there’s something valuable here, and I’ve already had lots interest in running the workshop elsewhere. So, if you want to take ethics seriously, my new workshop might be perfect for you. Now booking for in-house clients and as a pre-conference workshop. Includes a copy of Future Ethics for each attendee.
Please share with your networks, and drop me an email at cennydd@cennydd.com to find out more.
Empiricism as anti-ethics
Jack Dorsey and Kara Swisher are having a conversation on Twitter. They’re onto harassment and user safety.
Dare I say, ‘Observe, learn, and improve’ is the ethical problem. Fence-sitting empiricism dominates the industry. Our leaders espouse innovation pace above all, and argue we can mitigate harm after it hurts the vulnerable. It’s a flimsy dodge of ethical responsibility.
Agile and Lean Startup ideologies are central to this, of course. They have convinced us that unintended consequences are unforeseeable consequences, which is untrue. They’ve tempted us to prioritise validation over values. That has to change.
There are methods and techniques we can use to both broaden our view of potential stakeholders and anticipate the ethical issues that may affect them. These methods force us to look up from our familiar UCD and Lean manuals, our experiments, our safety nets. But it’s about time.