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Tuesday, December 2, 2003
Ethics in Design
The final section of Design Seminar is about ethics and principles in design. It is about why we design and how we judge.There are a lot of reasons to be embarrassed or ashamed to be a designer. We often serve commercial interests. Our stuff is ephemeral and often trivial. It's not an activity for adults. So then why do we do it? What is the redeeming value of what we do? Seamus Heaney in his Nobel speech "Crediting Poetry" asks the same question about poetry. He's seeking a principle to justify being a poet. Poetry is pleasurable, but it isn't enough. It needs to be grounded in principle. Principles are what organize. They ground us in organizations and in the world. Principles are values, which are facts, which equal status in the world. It is a fact that people value things. People will die for their values. Navigating remarkably conflicting values is one of the central problems of design. Caroline Whitbeck in Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research argues that ethics is traditionally regarded as judging something that has already been done. But the bigger challenge and what ethics should be is about the way to act. And that is a problem of design: devising ethical courses of action. Design itself is ethics. It is all about what is the right thing to do, and not just technically. Everything that is made is an argument about how we should live our lives. The world is filled with competing objects that are arguing amongst themselves for our attention. "Live my way! Live my way!" Deciding where and how to employ the art of design is an ethical issue. Designers need to be both technically right and compellingly wise. Wisdom is about evaluating and choosing between competing principles. And to be wise is to be aware. And awareness is the passage to action.
posted at 12:32 AM in
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