May 15 2018 | By Katharine Schwab for Co. Design
What Is GDPR, And Why Should Designers Care?
{Above: Rogotanie/iStock, Pavlo Zhoholiev/iStock)
PRIVACY MUST BE PART OF THE DESIGN PROCESS
GDPR is poised to become a crucial part of the design process itself. Product teams won’t be able to ignore what data is collected and shared by their product, and then go to a lawyer a few weeks before launch and say, “Do you see any problems with this? We’re going to launch in a few weeks,” Hancock explains.
Instead, thinking about privacy should happen during the design process. Yashoda Sampath, group director of research at New York-based design agency Huge, says that the data privacy conversations that tend to currently occur “closer to the build and implementation phase when we’re ready to put in the ad-tech and the partners and the business model, versus now we’re going to start having those conversations much earlier in design and development–even in the ideation phase.”
That means GDPR is on the table during brainstorming–not unlike how healthcare products are built around regulations like HIPAA from the beginning.
There’s a downside to thinking about regulation earlier, at least according to Mark Rolston, the founder and chief creative officer of Argodesign. “Things will cost more to do,” he says, and, indeed, Fortune 500 companies are spending billions to change their systems. Yet it’s a necessary step into the future. “I’m okay with it. I’m super excited for it to happen in the sense of the world growing up. We’ve been in this juvenile stage playing around with a lot more power than we’ve respected.”
One of the most compelling reasons to embrace the GDPR is that these kinds of data standards are here to stay–even if they haven’t hit the U.S. yet.
Read more about it on Co. Design.
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