Blogless

Some years back in my professional association with Nick, before BlogLESS, before DLB, we wrote a few posts together on a blog for the company where we worked at the time. It never really got its sea legs content-wise (quite unlike the uniformly polished gems you’re used to dealing with here) but Nick wrote a post there that I’ve thought about several times since, and today it’s finally time to rep it.

What he wrote was this: Design is "taking into account." What I think he meant by this is that a maximally good design takes into account and provides answers to a maximal number of factors (usability, ergonomics, ecology, aesthetics, performance, and so on).

Wylie High School by Esther Pearl Watson (via)

I told you Monday that I’d give you my answer to the question we all pondered over the weekend. What I proposed on Saturday was that we all try to assess whether we thought that a design could be ethical despite having consequences that were unethical. On Monday, I sketched a couple of canonical types of ethical theories, where deontological ethical theorists would answer that question in the affirmative, consequentialist theorists wouldn’t.

The key difference between those two theory-types, I suggested, was where they located culpability. Deontologists traditionally focus culpability on the causes of an action/design (say your mental states — “you were tired – your judgment was cloudy” — or your motivation for making the judgment — “all that matters is you did what you thought was right”). On the other hand, consequentialists focus on the effects (or consequences; get it?) of the action.

And this is where "taking into account" comes in. When a design firm takes an engagement, they create a contract with a client that essentially stipulates a trade of design for money. If design is "taking into account," you are agreeing to an exchange in which what you promise is to consider the consequences of your design. If you fail in your ability to do so, I believe, you are culpable.

This means that I am committed to some form of design-ethical consequentialism. Which flies in the face of a long history in moral philosophy of trying to keep one’s hands clean, so to speak — to construct some way in which one is not held accountable for the effects of one’s actions. I think that while the ability to achieve this is up for grabs given a sufficiently broad context of action (aka. no one agrees to being assaulted, so the ethicality of abortion for rape victims is a complex question), in the context of a design interaction, the rules are much more straightforward. Essentially, designers contract out their ability to take potential consequences into account.

However, it’s certainly worth noting that the criteria for doing ethical design are in this way regulative rather than constantive. What “regulative” means here is that because no designer can see perfectly into the future and make ethical decisions based on known effects, all we can do is develop a design ethics that operates as a sort of unattainable goal. From here on out, we’ll call the fact that we can’t see perfectly the effects of our designs in advance moral fallibility.

So, as I move forward in my slightly-more-structured attempt to develop a framework for design ethics, I’ve so far decided that any ethical postulates I arrive at will be regulative, that the site of culpability will be in their effects. However, I am willing to be argued out of this! What do you think? Let me know what you think and why in the comments to this post.