Behind the Scenes: Technology and Design Ethics at LinkedIn Learning.

“Let’s do the ethics course now then,” Simon (one of the Content Managers at LinkedIn Learning) said over the internet from somewhere in New York state and I nodded eagerly. Two years earlier I had pitched a course on tech and design ethics, and we had tentatively scheduled it to be recorded some time in 2020, but some recording resources had opened up at the end of the summer of 2019 and we decided to use it. In the time since I originally pitched the course, tech ethics had gone from a blip on the radar to the hottest topic at conferences worldwide, so the timing felt exactly right.

“Will you be able to spin this course up in such a short time” Simon continued. I looked out the window overlooking the Oslo fjord from the second story of my parents house and said “yes, I already have a plan.” 6 months later the course titled “Technology and Design Ethics” is live on LinkedIn Learning and I’d like to share a behind-the-scenes look at how the course came to be.

Making sense of ethics

My job, in its most basic form, is to condense complex topics into meaningful learning experiences. I like to say I spend my days learning difficult things so I can make them easier to learn for other people. When it came to tech and design ethics, the learning part was pretty much covered: My university degree is in philosophy, and I’ve spent the past 5 years digging deep into the ethical challenges and opportunities faced by the tech and design industries. I’ve written article, done conference talks, and run workshops on how to incorporate ethics into the design and development process, and I’ve developed a framework and methodology to help practitioners of these human-facing industries make ethics part of their tools and materials. That’s a fancy way of saying I think about and talk about tech and design ethics. A lot. Enough for my friends and family to be very done with the whole subject. But I digress.

Turning complex subject matter into a watchable, enjoyable, and meaningful video course clocking in at around 2 hours can be a challenge at the best of times. Doing this with ethics, a subject often perceived as dense, unapproachable, negative, and heavily theoretical cranks that challenge up quite a few notches. Fortunately I’ve chipped away at this block for quite some time and I’ve learned some valuable lessons:

• Telling people everything that is unethical about tech and design captivates the audience but doesn’t inspire meaningful change.
• The history and philosophy of ethics is deeply interesting for those deeply interested, but esoteric and unrelatable to most people.
• When tech workers and designers talk about ethics, they often understand it as either an onerous list of do’s and don’ts standing in the way of them in doing their best work, or a tool for risk and legal remediation or both.
• Everyone has the same questions: How do I use ethics in my practice, what do I do when I’m asked to do something unethical, what do I do if my company is riding too close to the line of unethical practice and I can’t quit my job?

With these insights as my foundation, a plan long incubated was hatched on my parents’ dining room table: Anchor the course in real work and everyday practice, frame history and moral philosophy as foundational building blocks directly related to the work we already do as technologists and designers, demonstrate ethics as a tool for ideation and discovery, and answer tough questions in a direct and honest way.

Real life matters

“That sounds great, but how exactly are we going to do this?” Andrew, my producer with whom I’d developed the “Tech Sense” course earlier in the year stared at me through the internet from Carpinteria, California. The floorboards in our rented apartment in Berlin squeaked as my son drove a train of cars from the hallway into the living room. “I want to present it as a circle with four corners. Start with Capability Approach, then go to Consequentialism, then Duty Ethics, then Virtue Ethics, and then back to Capability Approach again. Show how it’s a continuous circle. And we’ll show how each of these directly impacts our decision-making process using a practical example.”

Andrew nodded with his ‘I am being supportive, but this is sounds too theoretical to translate into a video’ face on. I thought back on a conversation I had with my wife while we were out walking some hours earlier: “You know those electric scooters that are starting to infest large cities? Well, here in Berlin they have scooters and bikes. And they are everywhere. I think that might be a good example to work with.”

It took about a month and a lot of chipping away at the still unformed blob of the course before the central defining feature started to surface: The course needed to be about practical ethics, and for that to truly sink in we needed to demonstrate the work being done. In real life I would run a workshop, so that’s what I proposed: We’d film a real practical ethics workshop and then build the course around it.

Abstraction

As I wrote the script for the course I realized I was telling the story from three different points of view – three levels of abstraction: Leading a workshop, explaining how to conduct a workshop, and explaining the theory behind the exercises. To make it clear to the viewer what “layer” of abstraction they were currently watching, I sketched out three shots in my notebook:

The Participant

Multi-camera live action documentary showing an actual practical ethics workshop being conducted. Four participants, in a real workshop scenario, with me as the workshop facilitator and synthesizer.

The Explainer

Wider talking-head style shot in the workshop context, probably with two cameras. I’m standing in front of the workshop set explaining how to conduct and manage the workshop. The visual framing makes it clear I’m talking about the workshop on a conceptual level, while not actually being part of the workshop on a practical level.

The Documentary

Talking-head style shot where I talk directly to the camera or to someone slightly off camera in a neutral setting. This is where the meta-content, the moral philosophy and theory, is explained and related to the industry and our work.

On shooting day, we ended up adding a fourth abstraction to our list: The Behind-the-Scenes where I stand outside the workshop space revealing it as a studio and explain how the course will progress and the role of the workshop:

Putting it all together

Throughout the planning process, one component was essential to me: The workshop had to feel real to the viewer. We’d scheduled five days in the biggest live-action studio at LinkedIn Learning’s Carpinteria campus, and to try to create this much needed authenticity we decided to dedicate day one to shooting an actual workshop with real workshop participants. We recruited four producers from our team, gave them the product brief for a useful but problematic app called “Nvntry,” and over the course of a day I facilitated the full-scale practical ethics workshop you see in the course.

The participants got no guidance from me about where I wanted them to end up, and I did what I normally do when facilitating these workshops: guided the team through the process and helped them collate and contextualize their findings.

At the end of the day, my workshop participants had uncovered serious flaws and significant opportunities in the Nvntry concept, and the conversation about how to build a better and more ethical product for the end-user continued long after we turned down the lights in the studio.

The next three days were spent shooting the Explainer and Documentary parts of the course, and then producers Spencer and Andrew built storyboards from the scripts and taped materials and everything was handed over to the editors and graphics team. The result is what you see in the course “Technology and Design Ethics.”

Ethics is the job

Making this course has been a year’s long dream and personal goal for me, and I am thrilled to see it out in the world and being viewed by my peers. It is beyond a doubt the most important work I’ve created for LinkedIn Learning to date and I am truly honored to work with a team willing to go along with me on this journey and turn my crazy idea of making ethics meaningful to technologists and designers into a beautiful learning experience.

With every design decision we build the future for our users and ourselves. I hope you enjoy our course.