Are Designers becoming Oppenheimer?
Psychology is a very powerful tool and every day various creative are looking for new ways to use it to design better the experience for humans. The Gestalt principles are an important example of this.
Don Norman is particularly popular for his work in this field, the invention or rather the discovery of UX design is based on using psychology to understand and modify user behavior. Brand designers like Marty Neumeier, Paula Scher, and agencies like FourthCanvas, Blind, and many other brand agencies have employed various principles backed by psychology to position their clients in the mind of their customers or users. Unfortunately, these well-meaning applications of psychology are being hijacked by big corporations in order to mask their sins.
These principles are learned by designers, copywriters, and other creatives in order to capitalize on the human ability to perceive and feel emotions based on visual, written, or any other forms of communication in order to pass messages across subtly and in ways that would be very easy for people to understand. Careful manipulation of these principles can be used to make you feel a certain way, buy a certain product over another or even recommend a product to a friend.
These applications are awesome in fact I admire and apply them too but the problem begins when these principles are being used to shift attention away from corruption, capitalize on sympathy garnered by endangered persons in order to appear inclusive, or even making profits at the expense of human life and environmental destruction. A company wants to appear like a company for everyone, what do they do? GRADIENTS! not just any gradients, the one particular to a marginalized group. Another company wants to put the rumors that they pollute the environment at bay, what do they do? Change their brand materials to Green and write a bunch of copies strategically positioned to make people forget about their atrocities.
Where do we draw the lines between making money because obviously creatives need to be fed and the values we are supposed to hold dear? It wouldn’t have been a problem if these companies aim to actually change this bad habit but rather they just want to make as many profits as possible, they don't care what happens to the people in their mine, the residents of the place where they mine oil or the children that are dead because of their presence in these regions.
Oppenheimer made the bomb just like designers are improving these skills today with good intentions but we all know what that bomb was used to do, and I think if we as designers and creatives are not careful, our craft is being weaponized to manipulate and cause harm. It then becomes a question of ethics, I mean Where do we draw the line?
