Deliberate Intervention: Using Policy and Design to Blunt the Harms of New Technology

by Alexandra Schmidt, Enrique Martinez (Foreword by)

Overview

"Do no harm" is Alex Schmidt's mantra throughout Deliberate Intervention—a book that delves into how policy and design can work together to prevent harms in technology. Using the journalistic approach she employed as an NPR reporter, Schmidt studies the history of policy making, its biases, and its evolution in the changing technology field. The beginning of each chapter highlights a graphic showing the transformation of policy and design, drawn by well–known illustrator, MJ Broadbent.

"For anyone who shapes or regulates new products, reading Deliberate Intervention is a step toward doing good by designing well."
—Conor Friedersdorf, Staff Writer, The Atlantic

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is for anyone who is concerned about the harms of technology and interested in ways to circumvent them, i.e., policy makers, CEOs of tech companies, IT people, designers, lawyers, security analysts, product managers, healthcare workers, historians, writers—in other words, just about everyone. It’s particularly helpful for anyone who is designing anything that involves technology and is worried about the potential harm in their decision-making.

Takeaways

Readers will learn:

• How policy and design can partner.
• The history of policy and how evident harms have led to policy interventions and improvements.
• As harms emerge from technology, individuals and companies really do have the tools to intervene.
• Government can control harms with new policies.
• How to create better policy with solid design measures.
• What the future looks like for people with the advent of new technology.

Testimonials

"Deliberate Intervention is an in–depth, thoroughly cited guide on the intersection of policy and design, employing a narrative style that makes the complex subject matter fun to read and easy to grok without losing any of its gravitas. An absolute must-read for any citizen designer.”
—Lisa Baskett, Healthcare Design Strategist

"What will it take to design technology that does less harm? This subtle book offers thoughtful, nuanced, sometimes unexpected answers. It's a good read for any curious user of technology. And for anyone who shapes or regulates new products, reading it is a step toward doing good by designing well."
—Conor Friedersdorf, staff writer, The Atlantic

"This book is what America needs right now. With our democracy in dire straits and tech companies threatening our rights and privacy, the need for us to be proactive about policy is at an all-time high"
—Ginger Reinauer, Senior Product Designer

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933820156
Publisher:	Rosenfeld Media
Publication date:	11/15/2022
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

ALEX SCHMIDT has pursued interests in public service and design through different avenues over her career. As an award-winning reporter and producer for NPR and others, she covered arts, business, technology, and urban development. Alex has published work in The New Yorker and The Los Angeles Times, among other outlets. Her writing about UX, privacy, and other design topics has appeared in A List Apart and The Columbia Journalism Review.
As a researcher, strategist, and UX designer, Alex has worked both for agencies and in the public sector. Her greatest interest lies in the wicked problems inherent in enterprise design and the mysterious ways of large systems. These are all areas she has delved into as a product strategist for The Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Introduction, Something's Not Right xi

Many-in the design world and outside of it-feel that something is not right with the development of our technology. This book is for those people to think more deeply about the intersection of design (which produces technology, typically in the private sector) and policy (which constrains and shapes new technology, typically from the public sector).

Chapter 1 A View of the Future 1

Humans are usually not great at predicting the future. And as technology develops at an ever more rapid pace, our responses to it are becoming all the more reactive.

Chapter 2 Policy and Design Basics 13

While policy and design have similar processes, they have-different underlying drivers. Rather than being contradictory, one could view them as complementary to each other.

Chapter 3 A Brief History of Policy and New Technology 25

From railroads to flammable clothing, evident harms are often the catalyst that lead to policy interventions. This chapter is a brief history of nondigital technologies, with digital technologies covered in later chapters.

Chapter 4 Unconstrained Spaces and the Emergence of Harm 35

Designing for new technologies (which today includes digital technology) is markedly different than doing so for established ones. Most designers don't look for harms, but they emerge from new technologies in recognizable patterns.

Chapter 5 Internal Interventions 53

As harms emerge from technologies, individuals and companies in the private sector have tools at their disposal should they choose to intervene, such as targeting designs to those most likely to be harmed, or proactively baking in values.

Chapter 6 The Beginning of Outside Regulation 73

How is government attempting to intervene in the harms of digital technologies? From regulations to outright bans, the public sector has its own tools that they are using in attempts to intervene and shape digital technology. In a way, this is where Chapter 3, with its history of government intervention into nondigital technologies, left off.

Chapter 7 Design in Policy-Constrained Domains 93

In fields like construction, healthcare, and finance, many of the harms are well understood, and thus the fields are heavily constrained by policy. Design in these domains is distinct from the process outlined in Chapter 4.

Chapter 8 Bringing Policy and Design Closer Together 107

With their complementary lenses in shaping the future, policy and design can move closer together to collaborate-and in fact, they are already doing so in notable ways.

Chapter 9 Using Design to Create Better Policy 119

Those who work in the public sector are using design methods to create better policy-another illustration of the idea that these spheres are moving closer together.

Chapter 10 Enterprise Design and the Policy Space 129

A sort of postscript, this chapter is a call to get excited about working on our complex, policy-constrained challenges.

Conclusion: Wicked Problems and Baby Steps 141

The problem of "shaping" our new designs and technologies is a difficult one. Small, directional improvements may be the best approach we have.

Index 145

Acknowledgments 157

About the Author 158

Editorial Reviews

"For anyone who shapes or regulates new products, reading Deliberate Intervention is a step toward doing good by designing well."
—Conor Friedersdorf, Staff Writer, The Atlantic 

"Deliberate Intervention is an absolute must-read for any citizen designer."
—Lisa Baskett, Healthcare Design Strategist

"Deliberate Intervention is an important resource for people in civic tech looking to navigate the complex relationships between policy, design, and technology. I wish it had existed earlier in my career!"
—Eddie Tejeda, Civic Technologist and Engineering Director

"Essential reading for those who want to help their organization become more effective while making the world a better place."
—Theo Linnemann, Computer Scientist and Technology Evangelist

From the Publisher

2022-11-30
A debut policy book calls for the regulation of digital technology.

Right at the start of her detailed work, Schmidt lays her cards on the table so readers will know whether or not they fundamentally agree with the pages that follow. When it comes to the vast subject of digital technology and its effects on young people, the author contends that society cannot afford to leave all meaningful regulation in the hands of the tech creators and purveyors. “Placing the responsibility on individual designers to fix these problems through ‘ethics’ is insufficient as a single response, particularly when capitalism is the paradigm they function in,” she writes. “Beyond these individuals, reducing the harms of digital technology is simply too big a challenge for the private sector to address on its own.” Schmidt takes some time to detail the history of governments intervening in order to regulate new technologies—everything from railroads, toys, and appliances to, more pointedly, radio and television. The author then elaborates on key concepts like “pain points” (the specific ways new technology is causing individuals distress, which can often be addressed by redesigning it) and “harms,” which can’t be quickly solved and call for intervention. Readers of such earlier books as Jean Twenge’s 2017 iGen will be familiar with the alarms that Schmidt raises in these pages, worries about tech-augmented problems like “wrongful imprisonments, spread of conspiracy theories, broken familial relationships, addiction to dopamine, the fraying of democracy, and widespread discrimination along racial and gender lines.” The author’s prose is passionate and refreshingly direct—she’s always compassionate and evaluative (and the text is well illustrated by Broadbent and expertly designed). But some readers will be alarmed by the Orwellian undertones to Schmidt’s call for the top-down regulation of what many would consider individual freedom of expression.

A thought-provoking, if sometimes overreaching, argument for policing new technology.

Kirkus Reviews