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Almost two weeks ago, I asked the question, “Why should there be any ethical concerns that are relevant to the success of a design?”

This question no doubt seems familiar to readers of BlogLESS, as we’ve long been tacitly and explicitly addressing reasons why there should be. This week, I used some of those arguments, and an analogy to Major League Baseball, to suggest not only that there should be, but that there must be.

Titian’s Venus and Adonis, Prado Museum and Art gallery, Madrid.

There should be

There are at least two relevant practical arguments, both of which are old-hat for BlogLESS readers.

Businesses, business owners and managers have a simple, practical motivation to employ ethical design. Businesses have a vested interest in consumer trust - it alone determines their continued success (and the continued success of their products). Trust is generated by businesses making and keeping promises to consumers, through advertisements and the products themselves, respectively.

Because the Internet is a place of widespread citizen journalism, if a business fails to deliver on its promises, or instead merely promises something non-meaningful, they will be found out, and this will have an effect that is precisely the opposite of the desired one.

Designers of all stripes also most often have a practical motivation to create ethical designs. This is the case not only because unethical designs undermine trust, which is what designers are often paid to create, but also because unethical strategies to create this trust - even before they are “found out” - often end up backfiring. This indicates that there is a practical ethical imperative inherent to making a good design.

Given the assumption that designers are interested in making good designs, it thus seems clear that they are also on the hook for engaging in some degree of ethical thought.

There must be

Additionally, this week I argued that these practical arguments indicate that design must have internal ethical criteria, a fact which motivates the assessment that not only should there be these criteria, there just are, whether we want there to be or not.

This argument is based on the premise that when unethical designs undermine trust in brands and products, they simultaneously undermine trust in the practices of design and advertising altogether. This self-destructive behavior threatens a regress of progressively less ethical behavior in response to a progressively more jaded consumer base.

Since we know that the society in which design functions will not allow this to continue indefinitely, and we also know that the profit motive is an important motivator in design (which is a primarily commercial enterprise), we can infer that if design practice did not come with regulative internal ethical standards, it would likely have self-destructed already. Insofar as this is not the case, then, we can be persuaded that design practice must come saddled with at least a minimal set of internal ethical concerns.

Which, while it says nothing about what exactly those concerns are, makes it abundantly clear that ethics not only should, but must be taken as criterial for a successful design in the same way that (e.g.) aesthetics or usability are.

To be in business, you have to have the requisite knowledge and/or skills of your trade. People trust that you know what you’re doing; that you know more about something than they do– I would call this authority. If you don’t have it, you have no business diagnosing and fixing things.

The trouble is authority can easily be abused. The quintessential example of this is an auto mechanic. While it’s the mechanic’s job to diagnose your car for you, it must be difficult for them to be impartial. It’s in their best interest to find something wrong or at least tell you that there is some work that needs to be done. This is not to say mechanics are inherently dishonest, it’s just that there is a definite conflict of interest in play.

“Oh yeah, you really need some new tires. And a new air filter.”

That’s what comes to mind when I think about Ethisphere– a company that I think bears many similarities to DLB. On one hand, they rate the most ethical companies in the world. But on the other, they offer ethics consulting and training conferences. Isn’t there a conflict of interest?

Perhaps that’s just the job. Having (or creating) authority gives one the ability to conduct business.

If you’re any kind of consultant, then, I guess you’re like our friend the mechanic. But, as such, How do I know I can trust you?

I can’t help but go back to Consumer Reports. I would argue it is easier to trust their authority because they have insulated themselves from influence. They do not accept any advertising because it might bias the magazine’s judgment.

But then again, judgment is all they do. To remain as impartial as possible, Consumer Reports cannot go out there and help companies make better projects; that, too could be construed as a form of bias (sort of like how a journalist cannot make the news).

While this framework helps ensure the public’s trust, DLB can’t model itself after Consumer Reports. We want to help people make things and make things that help people.

If we can’t create a bulletproof honest organization, perhaps we need something else.

Maybe we need a code to follow. Maybe all designers do?

We’ll take that up next week. See you then!

I argued on Monday that since we are more complex agents than the rules of our professions dictate, extrinsic ethical concerns can be relevant to our professional practices. Today, I want to show that our practices, merely by virtue of taking place in a context of ethically-bound agents, and having these same agents as participants, develop internal ethical criteria.

I won’t spend much time on baseball, preferring instead to bring the discussion back home to design, but I will talk briefly about one case where baseball imported extrinsic ethical concerns into its internal rules. I am of course referring to the controversy surrounding performance-enhancing drugs.

For most of Major League Baseball history, steroids were not a major issue. However, after the BALCO scandal, which involved allegations that top players had used illegal performance-enhancing drugs, the MLB internally legislated harsher penalties for steroid users. The new policy, widely accepted by players and owners, was issued at the start of the 2005 season. Why is this relevant? Because it is an example of an extrinsic moral intuition (one should not cheat) becoming a practice rule (a rule internal to the practice or game of baseball). We should at this point ask ourselves why this happens.

Baseball instituted a drug testing policy, I would argue, because the rampant cheating jeopardized the value of baseball in the minds of its spectatorial agents. Keep that in mind; I’ll return to it momentarily. Now, if design is primarily a commercial practice, we can say that a virtue of a design is that it is persuasive, or that it entices consumers to purchase itself or some product to which it owes its existence (e.g. in the case of an ad). A design that is highly persuasive is like a baseball player with a high batting average, or a low ERA.

I have previously suggested that there are good practical reasons for designers to adopt ethical persuasion techniques (i.e. they work better). I now contend that the the fact that these techniques work better is itself good evidence for the belief that design as a practice has some kind of internal ethical norms. In other words, the collective fate of Joe Camel and Toucan Sam should persuade us not merely that ethics happen to work for some other design goals and so designers should employ them, but, more strongly, that ethics are in themselves an end of design. This is the case for the same reason the MLB needed steroid legislation: merely by failing to legislate against normatively unacceptable behavior, a given practice jeopardizes its own perceived value, and thus its efficacy and even its continued existence.

In short, if baldly unethical designs fail to succeed, then there is at least a minimal ethical standard inherent in the requirements for a good design. Unethical designs, then, are to some extent simply bad design. I’ll cash all these chips in on Friday.

As we currently wrestle with a definition of design ethics, I have been struck by another question: what does the endgame for this project look like?

Not to jump ahead too far, but assuming we come up with a model of “good” design, what next?

I think we ask: What can be done to educate designers and consumers on good ethical practices? Moreover, how can we hope to enforce those ethics?

This post was inspired by Ethisphere, a business ethics think-tank that also publishes a magazine on the topic. I learned about them last week during this piece on NPR.

Besides their mission, what interested me is how they create awareness about business ethics in accessible ways. Ideally, if corporations and the public are better informed about ethics, that may serve as a kind of enforcement. Therefore, as we enter into the next stage of DLB — publication — I am interested in metrics and visualizations people use to talk about ethics.

For instance, Ethisphere has an annual list of the most ethical companies in the world. I can’t begin to imagine what a task it would be to compile a list of the most ethical designs, but it’s an idea. People like lists. They’re easy to digest and a good way to get people interested in complex topics.

Graphs are nice, too:

According to Ethisphere, ethical leadership leads to greater profits. It’s something we’ve been saying for a while, but now we have proof of it in handy chart form. Via Ethisphere.

I’m a bit skeptical about Ethisphere’s methodology, however. Participation in the index seems to be voluntary, so it’s not exactly comprehensive. It seems to be a more collegial affair; the magazine isn’t out there doing investigative journalism. There is no “least ethical companies in the world” list each year. (Though, I’d like to see that, too.)

I wonder why this is the case? On one hand, as a company that needs to sell magazines and fill conferences, how objective can Ethisphere afford to be? Who is to say they aren’t creating their own market by judging unfairly? Or being too generous to avoid stepping on toes? On the other hand, if they aren’t ethical or objective themselves, then they can’t claim any kind of authority. The more I think about it, the more complex the situation becomes.

I think DLB is in a similar pickle. How can one sell ethics in a trustworthy way?

I will try to figure that out on Thursday. See you then!

Nick made a great point last week, when he suggested that “aesthetics and usability are not good enough.” Today, I’d like to continue this suggestion. I hope to show why ethical concerns are supervene on the standard concerns of design practice (aesthetics, usability), whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. By way of analogy, I’ve concocted two situations for a fictitious professional baseball player, Gerald. Gerald is the starting pitcher in tonight’s game, which is of no particular significance to his team’s season.

The baseball examples are in honor of the American philosopher John Rawls, whose pioneering essay Two concepts of rules gives this discussion much of its shape.

Maximizing Value

Imagine that Gerald is approached by a person previously unknown to him, called Michael. Michael informs Gerald that he is the personal aid to the president of a major American steel mill, and shows him his card. He tells Gerald he has discovered that his employer has bet the company’s entire payroll against Gerald’s team winning the game. This means that should they win, several hundred workers will go without pay that month, a fact that may have potentially devastating life consequences for them.

A Personal Project

Imagine now that Gerald is approached by his ailing father, John. John informs his son that he is in debt to a dangerous bookkeeper for much more money than he can afford to pay. If he fails to pay, he says, surely he will be violently assaulted. His last hope, John tells Gerald, is to bet on a baseball game that Gerald plays tonight, and to ask Gerald to do his best to ensure that his team fails to beat the spread. Gerald has no reason to disbelieve his father, or to imagine that he is exaggerating the consequences of non-payment.

Agent Roles

Very clearly, the problem in both of these situations is “meta-baseball”, so to speak. What I mean is this: Gerald is a pitcher in the game of baseball, whose rules are unambiguous about the fact that the correct course of action for Gerald to take is to attempt to make an out of each batter he faces. However, Gerald is not merely a baseball agent, he is also a human agent. While the rules of baseball make the correct course of action quite clear, Gerald nevertheless has the choice as to whether to adopt those rules as guidelines for his action, even as he plays baseball.

This choice, which comes packaged with our particular kind of agency and society, is an ethical one. Since our professional dictates for action never fully constitute our rules as human agents, we are sometimes forced to make professional decisions based on rules that come from outside of those our professions specify. For example, for ethical reasons.

Integrity vs. Utility

Wherever you land on what Gerald should do in either of the cases described above, you are making an assesment about the relative values of an agent’s personal integrity and of larger social utility. In both cases, you might argue that Gerald is not responsible for the situation, and therefore has a duty to maintain his integrity as a baseball player in spite of the consequences. After all, perhaps Gerald’s team will lose regardless of whether Gerald sabotages them. Likewise, you might maintain that whatever Gerald’s integrity is worth, it is not worth fiscal despair to hundreds of people, nor is it worth physical harm to a person close to Gerald.

The point is, whatever you maintain, that Gerald’s decision about whether he should attempt to make outs or not is not as clear cut as the rules of baseball suggest. This means that regardless of whether the game of baseball has an an internal ethical component, ethical concerns for baseball players can and do exist.

How you play the game

“That’s all well and good,” you may say. “There are obvious extrinsic ethical concerns to the game of baseball, but that doesn’t mean that there needs to be a field of baseball ethics proper.” How right you are. But of course baseball must have an internal ethical component as well. And even more so design. I’ll look at why on Wednesday, and wrap up this analogy.

I ended up Wednesday settling on a working definition of “design” as something like that special practice of making something that’s desirable, viable, commercially successful and adds value to people’s lives.

Upon further reflection, I realized that I may have been so pleased with those items as criteria for picking out design quality, that I overlooked their clear shortcomings as a definition of design. Why, exactly? Well, where being desirable, viable, commercially successful, and adding value to people’s lives may be excellent criteria for picking out good designs from bad, they’re hardly useful for picking out a design from non-designs. After all, if every design was commercially successful, we’d all be a lot richer. Which means that they aren’t, after all, necessary criteria.

So we’ll have to go it alone. After a couple of days further thought, I’ve decided I’d prefer something like design is the practice of creating an object that is normatively understood to serve primarily commercial purposes. While that’s certainly not as pithy as some of its forebearers, it seems to me critical to definitionally couch design practice in a historical and social context, which none of them do.

Why? Because the only other kinds of viable and practical definitional strategies I can see rely on picking out motives, which makes them incredibly messy to implement. For example, it is no stretch to imagine a case in which some hungry young pop singer’s motivations are far more commercial than those of some thoughtful, say, furniture designer. In this case, if picking out design from non-design relied on their individual motivations, the singer would be a designer, and the designer would be something else entirely. Contrariwise, we’d be hard pressed to argue against the opposite results, which you can get by employing the normative intuition that where chairs are made primarily to sell, songs (and novels, etc.) aren’t. Here, by leaning up against cultural norms rather than individual motivation, we’ve more accurately picked an instance of design.

If this all seems like a dodge to you, in the sense, aka. that it can’t pick out a design in a vacuum, I’d argue that while it may not be as intuitively satisfying in a thought experiment sense as some of the definitions from Wednesday, neither does it suffer from their inability to pick out legitimate instances of design here in the real world. Which, after all, is the point of a definition. In other words, the vacuum for the world seems to me an excellent trade.

Design’s special relationship to the commercial sphere is what makes criteria like being desirable, viable, commercially successful, and adding value to people’s lives meaningful for it. So, you might fairly ask, “why should there be any ethical concerns that are relevant to the success of a design?” (Or, I might.)

Answering that question is what I’ll take up next week.

Meet the new drink, same as the old drink

I’m not a big fan of the redesigned Pepsi logo. Find me someone who is.

It seems like it was changed just for the sake of change and at the wrong time. Is now the right time to reinvent the brand? When people are struggling, is that what we need to see– a little bit of cosmetic surgery? How does that improve the product or make the customer’s life better?

Moreover, the new brand has been completely undermined for me ever since I saw this image:

Drawing by Lawrence Yang

Now, every time I see a new Pepsi, I see a drooling fat guy. It makes me yearn even more for the for the svelte profile of the old logo.

Pepsi’s Gravitational Farse

I’m not quite sure what to think of this:

Yes, the Pepsi gravitational field certainly does suck.

Someone seems to have leaked a document that contains the advertiser’s pitch for the new Pepsi brand. The New York Post describes its content thusly:

The document, called “Breathtaking Design Strategy,” is littered with historical, philosophical, scientific and mathematical ideas dating back to 3000 BC. It references the Golden Ratio, Feng Shui and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.

At one point, the presentation compares “Planet Pepsi” to the Earth’s magnetic pull, with diagrams showing Pepsi as the gravitational force between the end of the aisle and the checkout stand.

And it doesn’t stop there. The beverage goes from being the center of the Earth to the center of the universe.

It’s either a brilliant Andy Kaufman-style marketing campaign or shocking evidence that advertising has run off the rails. The description of the project seems too crazy to be real; like it has to be a joke. If it is, then “leaking” the document onto social aggregators to generate buzz is genius. The creators, Arnell Group, haven’t demanded the removal of the documents, but then again, the cat’s out of the bag. Taking it off the Internet would be impossible at this point.

Many seem to think it is legitimate. If that is true, then it seems to be an embarrassment. Even other advertisers are shaking their heads. Why would an a firm make something like this for a client? If the public would respond negatively to the brief, is it really a good idea?

Throwback a Pepsi

Image via.

Pepsi’s plan to release a cane sugar version in the US could be a good product. Many people say cane sugar soda tastes better and is better for you because it doesn’t use corn syrup. Doesn’t that seem like a quantitatively better product?

But, alas, it has a crappy brand. What kind of name is “throwback”? It makes it sound anachronistic or worse, like something you’d throw away. And that packaging looks awful. It’s like they really don’t want people to buy non HFCS drinks.

The first item on my list of open questions from Monday is an absolute whopper: "What is design?"

The term design encompasses so many aspects of our culture that it seems nigh impossible to come up with a definition that is neither so general as to be meaningless nor so specific as to exclude too much. But we’ve got to try. Why, exactly? Because when we say design ethics we mean more than merely, say, graphic design ethics, but less than ethics in general.

Many famous designers have subscribed to very broad notions of design. Among the most broad, Paul Rand claimed that “Everything is design. Everything!” But of course, even if that were true, it’s not very helpful.

Likewise, Steve Jobs has been known to wax poetical about design: “Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” While I might use that line to try to get a date, I wouldn’t make an SAT question out of it. But at least it narrows us down to products and services!

Saul Bass said that “design is thinking made visual,” a definition which is quite likeable, but still not exclusive enough. After all, Jackson Pollock certainly made his thoughts visual, but there seems to be a consensus that what he did was not precisely design.

Jackson Pollock, Bird c. 1938-41. (via)

DLB favorite Victor Papanek thought that “design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order” - a definition which also feels like it accurately describes design, but which fails to exclude various un-designy activities like, for example, bookkeeping or playing an organized sport.

Designer Richard Seymour echoed another kind of broad sentiment in 2002, suggesting that design is “making things better for people.” But almost any professional, from doctors to janitors to movie executives might say they, too, “make things better for people.”

Paola Antonelli (of the Museum of Modern Art) offers a more restricted sentiment: “Good design is a Renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something.” This seems to get closer by noting that designs address human needs with technology, psychology, and aesthetics, but those “needs” are still a little ambiguous for my taste.

I think my favorite definition from a practical standpoint - although I must admit that it’s the least pithy and high-minded of the bunch, ego-be-damned - comes from the Design Council’s What is Design brief. I’ll give it to you in context:

Scientists can invent technologies, manufacturers can make products, engineers can make them function and marketers can sell them, but only designers can combine insight into all these things and turn a concept into something that’s desirable, viable, commercially successful and adds value to people’s lives.

This seems to me, at any rate, a great place to start. I’ll try to take this definition and ground it in some explicit examples on Friday.