ARE YOU DESIGNING FOR THE USER'S VALUES — OR YOUR OWN?

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

As technology becomes more pervasive, the designer's role is shifting from crafting interfaces to shaping ethical guardrails for how people interact with machines. Empathy and traditional UX methods don't capture user values, so designers often unknowingly impose their own. Explicit ethical frameworks and evaluation tools are needed to surface value trade-offs—such as inclusion, autonomy, transparency, privacy, and well-being—and ensure products consciously align with users' values rather than the team's assumptions.