Design and Digital Interfaces: Designing with Aesthetic and Ethical Awareness

Are digital interfaces controlling more than we realise? 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.

Ben Stopher is Programme Director: Interactive & Visual Communication at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He has extensive experience as a practitioner and creative consultant in communication and digital design.

John Fass has been a designer and art director for fifteen years working in photography, information architecture, user experience design, interaction design and design research. He is course leader for Information and Interface Design at the London College of Communication, and PhD Researcher at the Royal College of Art, London.

Tobias Revell holds an MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art from which he graduated in July 2012. He is one of the course leaders for BA Information & Interface Design at the London College of Communication.

Dr Eva Verhoeven was awarded her PhD in Digital Creative Practice from Wimbledon School of Art/University. She is Course Leader of MA Interaction Design Communication at the London College of Communication