Ethical by Design :: Cennydd Bowles

We hosted Cennydd Bowles at Mesh for a talk on ethics in digital product design. Bowles is a former design lead at Twitter, where he led several redesigns including TweetDeck 3.0, and the author of Undercover User Experience Design.

The talk took Lean Startup thinking as its starting point. Built on experimentation, evidence and iteration, the approach can keep teams focused, but applied badly it turns into a numbers-first mindset in which people become statistics. Because digital products operate at very large scale, Bowles argued, designers carry real ethical responsibility.

He addressed three questions: how to balance data-driven decisions with empathy, how to get companies to treat users as more than a means to business goals, and how to make sure decisions benefit communities and the wider world, not only the company. Bowles also taught a full-day Visual Design Essentials workshop the following day.

Speakers

• Cennydd Bowles, Digital product designer; former design lead at Twitter; author of Undercover User Experience Design — Ethical by Design

The original event page is on meetup.com.