ARD501 - Contextualising Design - Design and Ethics

The 4th in this series of lectures, this one given by Dave Gill.

This lecture centred on ethics, and their involvement and impact on designers.

Why it matters - 50% of the worlds population don't have enough to meet their basic needs - for food, shelter, medication, so it raises the question if it is ethical to maintain a system that promotes financial gain.

He touched on  the historical perspective and approaches and attitudes to design, from the Bauhouse perspective of how ideally, a designers role is to create the 'one perfect design' for each object - so we would all sit in the most 'perfectly designed chair', for example.  This obviously doesn't take into account the human desire for variety and individuality.

And also the modernist ideal - that every design should be functional, serious, unsentimental, rational.  It ignores the need/desire for more than just those consideration, its about how you should live - not about how humans actually do live.



After WWII,  the USA, with its vast resources and potential to promote its idea's globally, the world of high mass consumption developed.  The idea that 'new is good, replacement is good' -so manufacturers use of designers is predominately to create the urge to buy, in a competitive market.




Dave cited Milton Glaser's  "12 Steps on the Road to Hell" - these attempt to get designers to consider what they would - and wouldn't do.

1. Designing a package that looks bigger on the shelf.
2. Designing an ad for a slow, boring film to make it seem like a light-hearted comedy.
3. Designing a crest for a new vineyard to suggest that it has been in business for a long time.
4. Designing a jacket for a book whose sexual content you find personally repellent.
5. Designing a medal using steel from the World Trade Centre to be sold as a profit-making souvenir of September 11.
6. Designing an advertising campaign for a company with a history of known discrimination in minority hiring.
7. Designing a package aimed at children for a cereal whose contents you know are low in nutritional value and high on sugar.
8. Designing a line of T-Shirts for a manufacturer that employs child labour.
9. Designing a promotion for a diet product that you know doesn’t work.
10. Designing an ad for a political candidate whose policies you believe would be harmful to the general public.
11. Designing a brochure piece for an SUV that flips over frequently in emergency conditions and is known to have killed 150 people.
12. Designing an ad for a product whose frequent use might cause the user’s death.

This suggests that as designers, we have to ask questions of what we are asked to do - we all have our own ethical code, and we also need to consider the wider implications, the 'knock on 'effects of decisions we make.

For example, we should ask ourselves questions -

How do we square today's trends for spending and consumption as if there will be no future costs attached?

Is there such a thing as 'sustainable design'?

Why should we employ self censorship?

We should question how much pressure/lies an organisation will use to make you create a design that benefits them profitably.

Should we be apolitical? Neutral? Obedient?

If we are problem solvers, shouldn't we be careful of the 'problems' we take on? Because Design is NOT a neutral, value free process.

In order to apply an ethical approach, the choice of content and client is crucial.

Dave pointed out that the balance between taking an ethical, informed approach, and the need to make a living is difficult. But, can we remain passive?

Or is it even right for designers to make moral judgements that interfere with the consumers right to decide for themselves?

Does society even know - or care - who designers are. Do it expect anything of us as a profession?

Dave suggested that its up to designers to decide if they are servants of industry - or a profession that faces up to moral issues.  If  design is a profession, we have to have integrity - because being professional implies a level of trust that is not attainable without that integrity.

1964 saw the publication of the Designers Manifesto, 'First things First'. It questions the work that designers undertook, and attempted to establish a set of ethical guidelines the designers, as professionals, should follow.

Dave also said the 50% of us apply our own boycotts to certain companies/products, for a variety of reasons.  Nike have been boycotted for their use of child labour; McDonalds for the detruction of rainforest in order to provide grazing land; Gap - for workers exploitation.


All the factors listed above leads to the question 'Do designers have to do anything'?

Dave said 'The next step is ours'

He said that today's designers must rediscover the purpose of design as a social, moral and  political force. We need to start by asking the right questions - where does the material we are to us come from?  What harm could the product do?  

And be aware of the difficulties.  We need to question information given to us to persuade us to 'create' a design - how do we know we are not being fed mis-information? Who can we go to to get the correct information?

In conclusion, Dave said that we shouldn't 'do things we don't agree with - and remember that 50-70% of the worlds population have an inadequate supply of basic necessities.'

Listening to this lecture raised several points for me.

The first is that moral and ethical views are likely to be formed by the environment you are raised in, and the situations/events you have witnessed, or been exposed to. So the 'correct moral and ethical' approach to a design may be determined by the country/culture you grew up in, the politics you were brought up with,  what's 'politically correct' in the society you live in.  Ethical viewpoints can vary widely dependent on all these factors. Who decides then, what is ethically right? 

In some respects, these views are highly personal, for example,  one designer may not have a problem with creating work for a campaign to bring back fox hunting, for example - whereas I would have strong moral objections to it.  That's a personal objection, and as such, I tend to think that the correct response is to refuse the work, if you feel that strongly.  Dave cited a similar example, where a student had been asked to design a cigarette package - now, if   this student has a big objection to smoking, or anything connected with it,  in my opinion that was a personal response, and - according to MY ethical code' the honest way to respond - if he felt that strongly - would be to refuse to do it.  Instead this student came up with the idea of designing packaging that fulfilled the implicit parts of the brief - that the packaging was 'attractive', that it protected the contents - but that was designed in such a way that you couldn't get the actual product out without breaking it. In other words, the design process was subverted in order for the designer to uphold his/her own ethical code.

Now, that to me creates a situation where the designers solution is in itself, questionable and unethical.  We all already know that smoking is bad for an individual, but it remains a legal choice to do so - and though a designer (or anyone else) is at liberty to speak out against it, or refuse to take part in its production or promotion, to take part in its production in order to deliberately set out to ensure that the consumer is deprived of what they have LEGALLY paid for, is dishonest.  We all make decisions that are bad for us so unless he lives an impeccable unblemished life, is it really right to take such action as an 'ethical' stance?  Is it 'ethical' for his/her views to be forced on consumers in this way?  I don't believe that a response/solution like this would do anything BUT damage the reputation of designers - and therefore, is it even ethical to cite this as an example of a solution?

I also think that designers - like everybody else - should be aware of the potential reaction should they choose to attempt to enforce their particular 'ethical' codes too strongly. Throughout this lecture, the smoking industry was presented as an area where it is, without question, ethically wrong to work - or at least, that's the impression that I (and several others I spoke to afterwards) were left with. People, as a rule, don't like being 'preached' too, or having others moral stances forced upon them - it can (and often does) puts people backs up. Now, I don't eat meat, I have my own personal reasons for this - but I was recently shown this video, made  by a character who feels strongly that meat eating is wrong - and I think he demonstrates exactly how pushing your own moral stance in the wrong manner (basically by being offensive and dismissive to those who don't share his 'ethical views') can have the opposite effect. 

That video is perhaps a rather extreme example, but the fact remains that far more discusion is generated about the delivery and attitude, rather than the actual content of what is being said - and I found that to be the case after this particular lecture, judging by comments made by both smoking and non-smoking fellow students, later.

I also think that few people, designers or otherwise, can in this current economic climate, afford to be 'that' picky.  Obviously we all have lines that we won't cross, and I do agree that EVERYONE, not just designers have an obligation to consider the wider moral and ethical implications of any decision we make/job we take on - but although in an ideal world, it would be obviously be preferable if we could all adhere to a strict ethical code, in reality, we don't all have the luxury.  We have to have the ability to be flexible and occasionally we have to accept that sometimes, we have to do things we neither approve of or are comfortable with.  I'm not saying that this is right - I am saying its real life. Its very much a matter for the individual as to at what point, ethical matters override economic need - easy to say ethics always must come first when you can afford to uphold them, AND pay the mortgage, sadly.

I feel strongly that the attitude of more than designers plays a part in this - the manufacturers and consumers have to be as accountable as the designers, and without the cooperation of all, the efforts of one is never going to be completely successful. 

So - in conclusion, I actually agree that designers should exercise ethical practise - but would temper that by adding that the reality of economic pressure and the need to live can and does have an impact on a designers ability to do so in every single situation that arises, and also that designers - like everyone else - need to be aware that its unnecessary, and sometimes even unproductive to take their own 'personal' ethical stance too far.  And I also feel that the impact of designers adhering to an ethical code would have far more success and achieve far more, if it is part of a collaborative code, also adhered to by manufacturers/companies and consumers.