Nobody does thor­ough­ly argued pre­sen­ta­tions quite like Sebas­t­ian. This is good stuff on ethics and design.

I decid­ed to share some thoughts it sparked via Twit­ter and end­ed up rant­i­ng a bit:

I recent­ly talked about ethics to a bunch of “behav­ior design­ers” and found myself con­clud­ing that any designed sys­tem that does not allow for user appro­pri­a­tion is fun­da­men­tal­ly uneth­i­cal because as you right­ly point out what is the good life is a per­son­al mat­ter. Impos­ing it is an inher­ent­ly vio­lent act. A lot of design is a form of tech­no­log­i­cal­ly medi­at­ed vio­lence. Get­ting peo­ple to do your bid­ding, how­ev­er well intend­ed. Which giv­en my own voca­tion and work in the past is a kind of trou­bling thought to arrive at… Help?

Sebas­t­ian makes his best point on slides 113–114. Eth­i­cal design isn’t about doing the least harm, but about doing the most good. And, to come back to my Twit­ter rant, for me the ulti­mate good is for oth­ers to be free. Hence non-pre­scrip­tive design.

(via Design­ing the Good Life: Ethics and User Expe­ri­ence Design)