The Ethical Designer - Cennydd Bowles, Twitter

For decades, the spaces we live in have been built by consensus. Planners, architects, councils, consultation; and always the watchful eye of the regulators and elected officials.
But the world's favourite digital spaces are largely in the hands of people like you and me. We have to oversee ourselves—and it's not going very well.
Are we focusing on the right problems? Or just aggrandising the mundane? How do we know what the right problems are? How can we guide ourselves to appreciate the cultural and personal impact of the decisions we make?
It's time for our industry to become ethically aware, if we're to have a chance of doing the right thing.

Cennydd Bowles is a design lead at Twitter, with a decade of experience advising companies on the benefits of customer-focused design. He writes a regular column on design for A List Apart, and is the author of the book Undercover User Experience Design.