The Pathetic Designer

By Hauke Sandhaus (Cornell Tech)

Forces That Shape Technology Design

The Pathetic Dot

In Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig excavated how behavior in digital spaces is regulated not just by laws but by an interplay of architecture (code itself), market forces, norms, and regulations. He argued that these forces create constraints shaping people's behavior in cyberspace. Lessig posited that in the digital realm, "code is law," and software design has a profound influence on user interactions and the broader digital environment. Lessig warned that as the internet evolved, the code's regulatory power might start prioritizing control over freedom.

The Pathetic Designer

In this critical reflection, I argue that the same forces that shape the behavior of users also govern the choices and constraints of those creating the technology environment. No matter how ethical or user-centered their intentions are, technology designers, like the individuals for whom they design, are limited by technical constraints, outdated laws, market pressures, and design norms. These external pressures turn designers into pathetic designers—powerless to realize the responsible technologies they aim to create.

Every digital experience is built on top of existing architecture—the underlying code and systems that determine what is possible. The way the cookie infrastructure has been set up has led to pervasive user tracking, encouraging practices that compromise privacy and push designers to accommodate data collection. Now, designers working within App Stores must adhere to stringent requirements and play by big tech rules. Soon, large AI models will quickly become the foundation for all types of artificial intelligence, and designers will increasingly rely on these models in their tech design, entrenching the rules embedded in them.

“Computational infrastructures are not the product of a design process. Instead, they are fundamentally compositional and not explicitly designed as a whole.” (Dourish ‘21).

While law is beginning to take responsible technology design seriously with regulations such as GDPR, which requires “privacy by design,” it is often unsynced, lagging behind, leaving gaps, or overregulating. 

Firms exploit jurisdictional arbitrage, regulatory gaps, and technological loopholes to dodge regulation. They manipulate legal and technical boundaries to evade oversight and accountability. For example, mental health applications rebrand as wellness apps to evade health regulation. Increasingly, hypernudges exploit data-driven, personalized techniques that create dynamic regulatory challenges that the law struggles to counteract and are resistant to traditional design processes.

Market forces exert direct and pervasive pressures on designers, often pushing them to create technology that goes against codes of ethics and fundamental principles of the discipline. For example, the demand for profitability drives the integration of dark patterns—interfaces designed to manipulate users into actions they might not take willingly, such as subscription traps, deceptive checkout flows, and endless scrolling mechanisms designed to exploit user attention. These design patterns prioritize engagement metrics and conversion rates over user autonomy and well-being.  

“Working with users, engineers, and management means that conflicts between user wellbeing and profitability need to be directly addressed in daily work.” (Lev Ari et al. ‘24)

Furthermore, some markets might be considered unethical by default. In the attention economy, scarce user time is the currency, leading to the creation of algorithms designed to maximize screen time, which results in addictive behaviors, mental health deterioration, and the erosion of meaningful online interactions.

Social norms dictate what managers and junior designers believe constitutes good design. For example, user experience metrics enforce long-term design goals, such as happiness, engagement, retention, task completion (Google’s HEART framework) as well as practical and enjoyable qualities (UEQ). Even Don Norman, often considered the godfather of user experience design, set pleasurable design as the gold standard for evaluating great designers.

“We interact with products and services that address our personal and short-term concerns pleasurably, often without considering collective concerns that may be in conflict.” (Ozkaramanli et al. ‘17)

Rigid design norms also shape user expectations about technology. Over time, certain practices—such as skipping past terms and conditions and cookie consent—become normalized. Norms often dictate what is acceptable in technology design, making it challenging to prioritize user well-being and autonomy over entrenched practices. Efforts to break away from these norms often face resistance, not just from corporations but from users themselves. This invisible but powerful force makes it challenging to implement ethical designs that deviate from principles of usability, attractiveness, and engagement. 

Pushing Outward

While many place the responsibility of unethical design with designers, as in Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World (Monteiro ‘19), the concept of the "pathetic designer" is not a critique of designers or their skills but a reflection of the structural challenges they face and the limitations of many well-intentioned approaches to improve ethics. Responsible design tools, such as ethical design cards, reflection activities, guidelines, and responsible AI tools, often struggle with adoption and navigating institutional power dynamics. Rather than providing effective support, these tools further burden designers, asking them to grapple with issues beyond their control.

More promising approaches in reclaiming designers’ agency include leveraging and influencing regulation, applying public pressure, and crafting sustainable business models. Field research shows that many designers are already using tactics to subvert pressures from below.

Recognizing these forces is the first step toward resistance. Designers must embrace their role as the last line of defense. By reclaiming power through upholding their expertise, designers can continue to create technology that genuinely enhances human life. It is time for designers to reclaim their agency, and actively reshape the hidden regulating forces to serve the needs of all people.

Sources

• Brignull, H., Leiser, M., Santos, C., & Doshi, K. (2023). Deceptive patterns – user interfaces designed to trick you. deceptive.design. Retrieved April 25, 2023, from https://www.deceptive.design/

• Dourish, P. (2021). The allure and the paucity of design: Cultures of design and design in culture. Human-Computer Interaction Journal.

• Edwards, W.K. et al. (2010). The infrastructure problem in HCI. CHI.

• Lev Ari, E. et al. (2024). Strategies of product managers: Negotiating social values in digital product design. CHI.

• Lessig, L. (2006). What Things Regulate. Code version 2.

• Monteiro, M. (2019). Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It. Mule Books.

• Norman, D.A. (2002). Emotion and design: Attractive things work better. Interactions Magazine.

• Ozkaramanli, D. et al. (2017). Long-term goals or immediate desires? Introducing a toolset for designing with self-control dilemmas. Design Journal.

• Pollman, E. (2019). Tech, regulatory arbitrage, and limits. European Business Organization Law Review.

• Rosengrün, S. (2022). Why AI is a Threat to the Rule of Law. Digital Society: Ethics, Socio-Legal and Governance of Digital Technology.

• Strandburg, K.J. et al. (2024). The great regulatory dodge. SSRN Electronic Journal.

• Wong, R.Y. (2021). Tactics of soft resistance in user experience professionals’ values work. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW.

• Wong, R.Y. et al. (2022). Seeing like a toolkit: How toolkits envision the work of AI ethics. CSCW.

• Yang, Q. et al. (2024). The Future of HCI-Policy Collaboration. CHI.

• Yeung, K. (2019). ‘Hypernudge’: Big Data as a mode of regulation by design. The Social Power of Algorithms.

Hauke Sandhaus

PhD Student, Cornell Tech

DLI Doctoral Alum

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Cornell Tech | 2024

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