Last week we had a chance to go through some master theses and had a task to choose one and analyse it. My choice was “Ethics of Interaction Design: A Comprehensive Research On How Interaction Designers Can and Should Be More Ethical” by Güney Güner. I chose this thesis because it is related and helpful to the topic of digital well-being.
This master thesis used the method of epistemological study and focused on acquiring as much knowledge as possible. The main goal of the thesis is close to mine because it is about raising awareness, as the topic of ethics in interaction design is often disregarded. I liked that the author of this thesis had a clear goal and structure, it was easy for me to find information and understand what they were writing about.
The result of the author’s research was the creation of a guideline and eight principle for designers to use when working on a certain product.
To my mind, it is important to think about ethics in interaction design because with all the technologies and products we have now, often ethics is neglected, which puts the user’s well-being not on first place in the UX field. Additionally what was interesting to read were the examples of immoral use of interaction design in the industry (The author used Twitter, Youtube, Google, etc for those examples). This thesis can serve as a guide or reminder while doing my research/creating certain products. The author specifically stated that further research and interview conductions can be made. Moreover, the code of ethics that was created can be turned into a visual aid (website, app, print) to increase the reach, which I think is also inspiring.
