Have you ever noticed that the long time you spend scrolling through Instagram is not healthy? Did you realize that most products you buy produce trash that will be in the world for years polluting essential things like water, soil and air? Did you know that besides eco-friendly paper exists, we still insist on using paper that contributes to greenhouse gas emissions?

We can blame the final consumer. A person who works in a 9–5 job like an ant, probably doing extra hours to guarantee that they won’t be replaced by a younger full of energy person, having few hours to solve personal issues, calibrate close relationships and sleep peacefully or deal with anxiety and insomnia.

But this end-user can also be seen as what they really are. People without time enough to think about each piece they consume.

The individual necessity to create a holistic consciousness about what is consumed is important for sure, but we should focus on the companies and their arms: the professionals that make it happen.

The price we will pay

Even the most conservative people can’t deny that the world is walking towards big problems if the greed of business guys can’t be controlled.

I already saw a lot of people treating this topic with disdain. Maybe you are one of these people. But it’s essential to talk about it a thousand times till something can be done for real.

The pollution they drop for us

First I would like to talk about the pollution being stuck in our heads. Besides all the storm of advertising we are being exposed to for years and years, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Tik Tok among others have come to add tons of information that we cannot digest properly and instead of repelling, we are totally addicted because they were planned to make us scroll and tap forever.

According to the Addiction Center, social media platforms produce the same neural circuitry that is caused by gambling and recreational drugs to keep consumers using their products as much as possible. When the user interacts with these apps, the dopamine signals increase in the brain.

“Studies have shown that the constant stream of retweets, likes and shares from these sites have affected the brain’s reward area to trigger the same kind of chemical reaction as other drugs, such as cocaine. In fact, neuroscientists have compared social media interaction to a syringe of dopamine being injected straight into the system. (…) When a person posts a picture and gets positive social feedback, it stimulates the brain to release dopamine, which again rewards that behavior and perpetuates the social media habit.” By Addiction Center

It’s an endless loop.

The teams that create this are totally aware of the psychological consequences for it, but why worry about it if the maximum engagement is what everybody wants, right?

Secondly and not less scary, there is the trash dumped in the world we belong to and it’s our home. Each year there is an average of 275 million tons of plastic being dropped in the environment we live in.

Some products like food wrappers will have a quick lifespan before being disposed of and they will persist in the environment for hundreds of years. The plastic will become microplastic and the small particles will break down into smaller pieces. They were already found in drinking water systems and in the air.

The responsibility designers must have

For all these companies producing their products, there are a lot of professionals involved and in the area that most concerns me: the design!

You may think that I will put all this weight on the designer's shoulders and of course, I won’t do that. But it’s undeniable the huge importance of UX designers, product designers, packaging designers, graphic designers, or any other terminology you want to use for the role that design things we will use in our daily lives.

It’s in our hands to work with ethics!

We work with discovery, research, defining features, micro-interaction, interface creation. We define the types of approaches and which materials a project should use.

We are a central part of it! We can bring innovation to our workplace focusing on questioning sustainability values and people’s mental health as part of the process and evangelize about new attitudes towards daily consumption.

The professionals should not do whatever the company wants without offering some kind of resistance when they know that unethical consequences might come.

The knowledge designers have to create many types of products and to understand people’s behavior should be used not only to make more sales but to offer something good for the social side considering the contexts involved.

I feel like a kid asking for a utopian state of mind for people but it should not be this way. I already notice many times ethics being considered a silly thing. What a stupid mindset! Each professional should understand its importance and power in society.

A society that accommodates children, mothers, fathers, relatives, close friends and everyone who is important to us.

It gives a bit of hope when it’s seen professionals deeply involved in products like mentioned above who start speaking out.

“I feel tremendous guilt… I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice president for user growth, last November during a talk at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He added that he himself rarely uses Facebook, and that his children “aren’t allowed to use that shit.”
clipped from Science Focus article

Maybe a job that offers a big amount of money can help you buy two houses and more, but what is the price everybody pays in the long term when professionals accept and create interfaces that make people feel overwhelmed and thirsty for immediate pleasures?

Because of that people are becoming dumb, depressed and anxious.

And what about being open to participating in product creation that uses non-durable material without a smart discard plan for them? Without forgetting to mention the useless products!

The world doesn’t have a place to dispose of all this shit.

I know that in many situations don’t accept what is asked by the leadership means being fired. Sad but true. However, the other option can be even worse: a sick and uninhabitable world.

And for not billionaires, like us, living on the arid Mars is not an alternative.

So, you, dear designer, please study and use all the sustainable and healthy solutions you can offer to the end-user.

I know it can sound like a superhero movie script, but let’s try to save people’s minds, biodiverse oceans, forests, rivers and all types of life that share the existence here stopping greedy companies from making us produce and consume trash that affects both our own health and the planet’s health.

Sources:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/plastic-pollution
https://www.lifegate.com/plastics-reuse-recycling-design
https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/trapped-the-secret-ways-social-media-is-built-to-be-addictive-and-what-you-can-do-to-fight-back/
https://www.healthline.com/health/social-media-addiction#decreasing-use
https://www.addictioncenter.com/drugs/social-media-addiction/