Design and Digital Interfaces: Designing with Aesthetic and Ethical Awareness

Digital interfaces are controlling more than we realize, and designers must take responsibility for their social, ethical, political, and aesthetic impacts. We need an expanded aesthetic, critical, and ethical awareness to ensure that designers act with sensitivity and understanding towards the people they design for and with.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 176 pages
Publication date: 12 August 2021
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Are digital interfaces controlling more than we realize? Can designers take responsibility, and should they? From domestic appliances like Siri and Amazon Echo to large-scale Facebook manipulation and Google search prediction, digital interfaces are ubiquitous in everyday life and their influences affect how people live, feel, and behave. As they grow in complexity and increase integration into our lives, we need to address the social, ethical, political, and aesthetic responsibilities of those designing and creating the computer systems all around us. Through discussion with cutting-edge designers and thinkers and with international examples, the authors explain how we need an expanded aesthetic, critical, and ethical awareness on the part of designers willing to act with sensitivity and understanding towards the people they design for and with. This critical take on the process and implications of interface design looks beyond the mechanics of making and into the techno-political realm of deliberate and unintended consequences.

Are digital interfaces controlling more than we realize? Can designers take responsibility, and should they? From domestic appliances like Siri and Amazon Echo to large-scale Facebook manipulation and Google search prediction, digital interfaces are ubiquitous in everyday life and their influences affect how people live, feel, and behave. As they grow in complexity and increase integration into our lives, we need to address the social, ethical, political, and aesthetic responsibilities of those designing and creating the computer systems all around us. Through discussion with cutting-edge designers and thinkers and with international examples, the authors explain how we need an expanded aesthetic, critical, and ethical awareness on the part of designers willing to act with sensitivity and understanding towards the people they design for and with. This critical take on the process and implications of interface design looks beyond the mechanics of making and into the techno-political realm of deliberate and unintended consequences.

Weight: 398g
Dimension: 234 x 156 x 16 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350068278