Creating Standards: Our Secret Job as Researchers

challenges for software professionals, and like most of my peers, I want to do ethical work. I aspire to help coworkers design and develop useful software products and positive experiences for users, and, where possible, to help users advocate for themselves. But recently, advocating for ethics has become a research duty on its own. “Ethical AI” is appearing everywhere, from company marketing materials to individual LinkedIn profiles, with little hope of improving tech governance. My goal in this article is to argue that researchers do our best work influencing software production and guiding tech governance not by Designing and developing software involves making claims about what users want. In the early years of personal computing, central claims about user goals, desires, and everyday life came from psychologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists who collaborated with technologists in innovation centers like Xerox PARC [1]. In the past decade, however, the widespread adoption of software and massive growth in the industry came with a new professional title: the user experience (UX) researcher. In my day job, I am one of tens of thousands of UX researchers working in the software industry. Researching D Creating Standards: Our Secret Job as Researchers Danny Spitzberg, Georgia Institute of Technology