Social Design: How to design with social impact in mind

For the past decade, Silicon Valley has chanted "Move fast and break things." The problem is, what we often "broke" turned out to be our psyche, attention, and social cohesion. Dark patterns, infinite scroll, and rage-inducing algorithms built giant tech empires at the expense of users' mental health.

It's time for Humane Technology.

Social Design is a discipline that centers not just the user, but also the external consequences (externalities) of a product on society as a whole. It's a shift from User-Centered Design to Humanity-Centered Design.

Every interface you design is a form of persuasion. By creating a button or a notification, you impose your point of view on the user about what is most important to them at that moment.

Practical Implementation of Ethics

How can one be an ethical designer in a commercial world where DAU (Daily Active Users) and ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) are paramount? Here are a few small battles you can win:

• Friction by Design: Add friction where an action is destructive (e.g., delaying account deletion to prevent hacking attempts).
• Stop Infinite Scroll: Design clear "endings" for content consumption (e.g., a "You are all caught up" message).
• Defaults Matter: Set the safest and most private options as defaults. Users typically don't change factory settings.

Ethics in design isn't an add-on at the end of a project. It's the foundation upon which we must build the architecture of digital products. If we don't take care of the user, business metrics will only turn them into a "target."