Blogless

If you accept my argument so far, then we’ve agreed that any design is subject to moral criticism, and that designers are beholden to take ethical considerations into account in their design decisions. In other words, that whether or not you design something in an ethical way, that thing will be judged as successful or not at least in part along ethical lines. This means that designers, insofar as they are self-interested (would like to continue to have careers in design), have good reasons to engage in ethical design practices.

This post is meant to introduce a wrinkle in that account, which works in the following way: I mentioned last week that our shared moral values are only one in a set of value domains to which a design is beholden. I was clear in that post that there are others: beauty and usefulness, I said. I want now to suggest a problem that this introduces.

Evening News, by Amy Bennett

First, it seems clear that design, insofar as designers are self-interested, is also beholden to corporate interests. While in large part this boils down to a successful appeal to end-users, it is often the case that successful appeals can be made by prioritizing certain design virtues (e.g. beauty or persuasiveness) and leaving others (e.g. ethical considerations) by the wayside. In fact, my exemplum provides such a common scenario that we have created an entire blog to talk about it; this blog, BlogLESS.

Second, since it is obviously the case that we can engage in design practice that counts as successful while excluding any one or more of these virtues (consider MySpace, which I take as the modern locus classicus for successful design that excludes beauty), it must be the case that these virtues are non-reducible to one another, that is, that they are fundamentally plural, and that no one of them can count as a “master” virtue, as “true north” so to speak, against which the others would come to make sense contextually.

These considerations can be taken to lead to the idea that reasonably successful design practice could, in fact, simply exclude some values as consideration while excelling in its consideration of some other values, and still meet the minimum requirements to qualify as “good”. As I noted above, this seems to be the very conclusion that underwrites a much if not most actual design practice today.

Thus, there is a fair question that asks, “How do we know, in a given circumstance, whether to prioritize ethical considerations or some other valid design considerations?” This is the question I will take up over the next several weeks.