What could possibly drive positive change in the tech industry?
7 reasons why companies are willing to rethink their unsustainable, unethical, and wasteful products. Spoiler alert: you have a say in all of them.
Let’s face it: tech needs to change.
We have a myriad of problems in the digital space that affect society and the planet negatively: invasive personal data collection and trading, deceptive and weaponized AI that also uses a gargantuan amount of energy, spreading of propaganda and misinformation, addictive social media design, e-commerce design that encourages excessive consumption, e-waste, and the list goes on.
These problems are obviously big and hairy, but there is usually a strong commercial or business interest that fuels them:
- Facebook uses addictive design and shows you triggering content to glue your eyeballs to the screen. The more time you spend in the app, the more money they earn from ads.
“Whatever you think of Facebook’s and Twitter’s leadership, they surely didn’t set out to create a strategy to sow discord and polarize people. But they did instruct managers to maximize the platforms’ growth and revenues, and the algorithms they devised to do just that brilliantly succeeded — with alarming consequences.” — Harvard Business Review
- Apple launches shiny new iPhones every year to “spurr enough people to upgrade”. “Old”, but perfectly functioning, phones get tossed onto the growing pile of 54 million tonnes of e-waste
- Temu applies persuasive design in their e-commerce experience to encourage excessive consumption of unnecessary stuff, regardless of the environmental footprint.
Companies must change their products, practices, and sometimes even their business models for a healthy, equitable, and sustainable future. But why would they do that?
Companies exist to make profit
The one thing we need to know about a business: it exists to make profit.
Since profit comes from selling products and services (from now on I’m just gonna use “products”), companies need to offer something people are willing to use or pay for.
And therein lies the motivation to change: companies are willing to alter their products if they realize that they can sell more (≈ earn more money) after the changes.
Companies pick up signals from what is happening around them to decide their next move. There are 7 signals that can especially influence business decisions and thus drive positive change in tech.
Let’s take a look at these 7 drivers of change.
1) Consumer demand
Companies need people (or other companies if it is a B2B) that buy or use their product, otherwise, they won’t be able to make money.
That is why market research is such a big part of product development. Companies want to align their offering to what consumers say they want. The other side of the coin is of course the actual sales (or usage) numbers that show what consumers are buying and using in reality. If they notice that a product doesn’t bring enough money, it is time to reconsider things.
Why do you think Apple is launching “carbon neutral” watches? Because they understand that environmental sustainability is becoming an important part of decision-making for their consumers. Simply put: they can reach a wider audience (sell more watches) if they claim their products to be a more sustainable version.
2) Competition
If a business doesn’t pick up the signals on an unmet need, chances are soon there will be a new player on the market fulfilling that need.
Take Fairphone as an example. Bas van Abel realized the unmet need (ie: consumer demand) for ethical and reparable smartphones way before Apple did. He founded Fairphone which now has an influence on the industry. Fairphone’s presence and growth (76% more devices sold in 2020 than in 2019) show the increasing demand for sustainable electronics.
Which not even Apple can ignore any longer, hence the ‘carbon neutral’ products. And do you remember Apple’s efforts to make the iPhone 14 easy to repair? If there was no Fairphone pushing the boundaries on how easy it can be to repair your phone, creating new standards and consumer demand, arguably there would be no repairable iPhone either.
3) Employee demand
Companies need talented and dedicated designers like you to build great products. If no designer is willing to work on an ethically questionable or unsustainable product, the company won’t have a product to sell. (Or they ask the engineers to do the “design”…good luck selling that!)
There are two ways a company can notice signals from employees.
The first one is the lack of skilled and dedicated employees. For example when a company puts out a job ad and there is no decent designer who wants to take the job, or when valuable employees leave the company because of unethical or unsustainable practices. Not being able to attract and retain talent is a big 🚩 for the company that they should recognize as a signal for a necessary change.
The second one is when employees internally express their demands or disagreement with how thighs currently are.
Take Tristan Harris as an example. He worked at Google when he realized the harmful impact of Google’s attention engineering efforts (think constant email notifications on your phone to grab your attention and pull you into your Gmail account). One day in 2013 he sent out a 141 slide PowerPoint “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention”. It resonated with others at the company so no surprise it went viral.
“The slides were often referred to by employees fighting internal battles over features designed to maximize user attention, former employees said.”
Google had no choice but to recognize the employees’ demand for more ethical tech. Years after Tristan’s slides, Google launched wellbeing.google where they encourage users to “Unplug more often” and “Minimize Distractions”. Would they have done this without Tristan's slide deck and thousands of employees fighting the uphill battle for ethical tech? Doubtful.
4) Industry professionals demand
As a designer working in the trenches of the tech industry, you have the opportunity to notice cracks before anyone else and voice your concerns to the whole industry.
Continuing with Tristan’s story, let’s see how he took tech ethics from Google to the whole industry. After he left Google, he (together with others) founded the Center For Humain Tech, which does amazing work around increasing awareness and education about tech ethics industry-wide. They even released an entertaining yet alarming documentary (The Social Dilemma) on Netflix that reached millions of people and educated them about the dangers of social media. Thanks to this, consumer demand for ethical tech is growing, which in turn gives space for companies that offer easy and comprehensive personal data protection solutions (like Aura). And of course legislation around personal data like GDPR. See…everything is connected (hence all the arrows in the chart).
Another example of the power of a designer in igniting positive change is Deceptive Patterns. Manipulating user behavior and decisions has never been ethical, but we didn’t pay much attention (or didn’t know how to handle it) before Harry Bignull published Dark Patterns (now Deceptive Patterns). He did a tremendous favor to the whole industry by naming and structuring these patterns. His work inspired others to care about and fight against Deceptive Patterns. As an industry (or design community) we now demand companies to not use Deceptive Patterns and call out the ones that do. And thanks to all this collective effort, the application of Deceptive Patterns is now prohibited by law in some countries.
This brings us to the next driver of change…
5 ) & 6) Citizen demand and regulations
Companies must obey laws and regulations to legally sell their products.
I mentioned GDPR and Dark Pattern regulations already and here is another one: Apple now must sell their phones with USB-C charger instead of their proprietary “Lightning” cables thanks to an EU Law. This law of course aims to reduce e-waste.
“$312 million (250 million euros). That’s how much money is wasted every year on unnecessary charger purchases in the EU, according to the European Council. There is also around 11,000 tonnes of waste produced every year from unused or thrown away chargers and cables.”
In Western democracies, laws and regulations are developed (or influenced) by the officials we elect to represent us. So as citizens who want to see change, we can vote for officials whose agenda aligns with ours or we can voice our concerns in letters or emails directed to elected officials, in public forums, etc.
7) Investor demand
Companies need investor money to grow, innovate, experiment, and sometimes just to stay afloat.
For example, Fairphone was founded in 2014 but the first year they turned profit was 2020. During those early 6 years, they needed investor money to finance their operations. People and companies that believed in Fairphone's mission of producing a sustainable smartphone, loaned their money to the company.
As the demand for sustainable and ethical products is growing, investors are more and more going to support companies that respond to these demands.
“ Investors want to invest in companies that have a future. So if a company does not have those bold [sustainabiliyt] commitments and show that they’re executing on them, then investors will take their money elsewhere.”
So there you have it, 7 drivers of positive change in the tech industry with real-life examples.
Of course, this is a simplified version of the reality. Economics, business, politics, and human behavior are more complex than I can fit in a sensible chart. So before you get the illusion that if you stop using Facebook Mark will immediately change their business model to something less exploitative, I would like you to keep three things in mind:
Change happens because we demand it together
One person alone won’t be able to change a whole business or a system. Yet taking individual action is crucial to ignite positive change.
Using the Google example again: Tristan was the first one who took action (alone) and then thousands of designers joined him to fight the battle. Those were all individuals taking action separately but added together, they sent a strong signal to Google: we want change.
The more of us use our actions and voice, be it as a consumer, an employee or an investor, to signal the change we want to see, the less a company can ignore the demand.
Change happens because we demand it consistently
Those Google designers didn’t just once pull up the deck and made their case. They argued for ethical design meeting after meeting until they saw results.
In order to make change happen, we need to be consistent, persistent, and continue taking action.
Change doesn’t happen overnight
Tristan shared the slide deck at Google in 2013 and wellbeing.google launched in 2018. Not a quick turnaround, but it is a trunaround. Change might happen slowly or gradually, but it happening. Because we demand it together consistently.
What you can do today
I mentioned “use our actions to signal the need for change” earlier, so I wanted to give you some ideas about what actions you can take using the 7 drivers framework to signal the change you want to see:
As a consumer
- As a consumer, you vote with your money. The more money you spend with a company, the more you support them. So cast your vote and buy from companies that align with your values.
- Sometimes you support a company with your time and attention. (think Facebook: free-to-use product but they make more money the more time you spend in the app). So in this sense, you can vote with your time and attention. Spend these limited resources on products that align with your values.
As an employee
- Work for a company that you believe in and can stand behind its values.
- Or work for a company that doesn’t align with your values and ignite the change from the inside.
As an industry professional
- Choose an issue and be vocal about it. Bring it up with colleagues, go to meetups, and share content about it on your platforms. If you have the ambition, time, and energy: speak about it at conferences, write a book, create your own content, etc. Or you can always support others already fighting the battle by sharing their content, supporting them on Patreon, buying their book, etc.
As a citizen
- Vote for politicians whose agenda and values are aligned with yours.
- Express your demands: send an email or letter to your elected official, speak up on public forums, etc.
As an investor
- If you invest in the stock market, buy stocks from companies you believe in, or choose funds with a sustainability focus
What change can you fight for?
We have established that there is a lot that needs to change in tech. But we all have limited time and energy, so simply don’t have the bandwidth to pick up fights on all the fronts. And we are naturally more interested in some things than others.
To help you choose a battle (if you don’t have one yet), here is a list of problems in tech that need to be addressed and resources where you can get started. (I’m sure there is more, leave your suggestions in the comments, I would love to expand this list!)
- Energy consumption of digital products, data and AI — Gerry McGovern webpage and LinkedIn
- End of life of digital product — Joe McLedon’s And Ends website and Endineering course
- Sustainable UX — The Sustainable UX Network, Sandy Dähnert — Green The Web
- Sustainable Web Design + books from Tim Frick and Tom Greensburg
- Sustainable e-commerce design: Me, this is my passion topic, here is my first article
- Deceptive Patterns — Harry Bignull
- Tech Ethics: Center for Humain Tech, Your Undivided Attention (podcast
- E-waste
- Accessibility
- All the AI problems
- Inclusive design
- And a lot more. Leave suggestions in the comments
Closing thoughts:
Often it seems impossible to ignite or demand the change we want to see. Companies are big and powerful machines and we are just one speck. Even if we manage to get in between two cogs, we have way too little impact to halt the grind… let alone the whole system.
But I hope this article shows you that even though you are just one speck, together with many other specks we are a pile. And when a pile gets into a fine-tuned machine, it’s trouble!
Your individual action counts, even if it is hard (or impossible) to measure. So keep at it, and fight your battles because through your actions you are building a better tomorrow.
“A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead
