What can Service Design do about the way we interact with the World online?
When you can’t figure out how to do something or how something works , how often do you just ask google your question before talking to another person?
I am a millennial, and Internet has been my go to source of information for as long as I can remember whenever I am researching something for my studies, work or even just out of curiosity.
It is undeniable that being able to google any question that comes to mind has changed the way we debate, research, prove a point, gather or showcase information and overall interact with each other.
This is a very complicated change to analyse, which brought new practices into our lives that can simultaneously be good and bad, and in my opinion we do need to formalise some steps that it is good to take into consideration when putting information out there in the World, but also when we are consuming it.
Here are some of the key aspects that I have been looking at while thinking about what challenges the major project of my MA Service Design could tackle.
Authenticity
Fake news is no news, not only in the sense that we need to be aware of it and check our sources, but also in the sense that alternating a piece of information to best fit the audience, mostly in a political context, isn’t a practice born with the Internet.
An example of this was told by the historian Alessandro Barbero in 2018, during a conference about the Emperor Constantine, who allegedly united the Roman Empire under the Christian fate. During his talk, Barbero illustrates how the facts contained in Constantine’s biography, as well as the various documents that were used to communicate with the commons, changed not over time but also according to who would receive them. You wouldn’t tell to a pagan community that you won the battle thanks to the protection of the one and only Christian God to get their consensus, would you?
Nowadays, anyone can upload information so easily that we can find ourselves overwhelmed by the amount of information available — how do you spot the trustworthy news in this endless stream of information, opinions and perspectives?
Over the past few years, different platforms have been working to tackle this issue, for example, Logically combines AI with experts to create a fact-checking team that can ensure the authenticity of the information that is share online.
In my opinion, applying Human-centred Design principles would be a valuable method to understand what good practices there are that we could collectively uptake to ensure that we are not feeding into the misinformation and fake news machine.
Polarisation and Inclusion
The Web is a marvellous place, where you can find any type of information, community, and conversation, even the most niche and rare ones.
This is incredibly valuable to gather a well-rounded view of the World and what happens in it, but how often do we willingly choose a source that we know we’ll disagree with? How often do we look at a point of view that is different form our own?
Algorithms, as well as our own online habits (favourite news website, forums, and online communities), easily lead us to surround ourselves only of like-minded people, who support our opinion and/or share the same point of view. People with different ideas are driven further and further apart, the World seems to be loosing all of its nuances: either you are on one side or another, often there is no opportunity to challenge an idea or debate without having to take a strong position.
It is no secret that internet is, amongst many other things, a big source of bullying, or trolling, and exclusion — just read the comments underneath almost any YouTube video!
Different platforms are being developed to empower people to defend and protect themselves from harmful online interactions, such as the Care bot, designed by Caroline Sinders, and programmed by Alex Fefegha, to provide guidelines on how to recognise and deal with online harassment.
Design Justice and System Thinking could be a relevant methodologies to look at other ways to tackle this problem, the two combined could provide a different strategy, for example: how might we encourage critical thinking? How might help people with opposite points of view connect and discuss ideas? How might we ensure that different online voices are equitably amplified?
Sustainability
Last, but not least, I would like to include in my research the environmental impact of people’s online behaviour.
Steps have been taken into this direction, for example, by the designer Gauthier Roussilhe, who has been collecting articles, talks and guidelines that explore what a digital ecosystem would look like if we were seriously taking into account the amount of CO2 emissions. Research through design and speculative design could be valuable methodologies to understand how we could make our digital carbon footprint visible and actionable in practice.
What if training and guidelines to meet these goals were put in place for people to learn how to interact online sustainably?
