Blogless

A trend in DLB’s emerging design ethics philosophy that the primary criterion for ethical design seems to be that it motivates ethical business practice. We have discussed here now many times our set of purely self-interested reasons why companies should be ethical (because people are going to find out if you’re not, and because self-publishing and social media will then enable them to break your trust relationship with their entire social network). This leaves us open, I think, to the counter-argument that if this is the case, then designers don’t really have anything to do — when products sell themselves, designers don’t have to to design their way out of a paper bag!

In other words, couldn’t design (used here in the sense of new media production and advertising) just as easily be understood as successful when it helps a client hide their ethical blemishes, and sell in spite of them? Yes, it could, and I would suggest that it very nearly always has been. But, our ongoing argument here at BlogLESS is that this strategy is becoming progressively more difficult because of (e.g.) search engines and self-publishing. Our further argument is that this fact implies that there are good, practical reasons for trying to reframe this problem into a different, easier to handle problem.

When you’re trying to reframe a complex problem, you look at its presuppositions. Advertising is making promises. That’s just what it is. Whether it’s vague, irrelevant or ironic, every advertisement is a promise, and every promise is an opportunity to accrue or lose consumer trust. Old-model advertising famously and unceasingly works to maintain trust by staying one step ahead of the viewing public. (Creativity here seems to be tacitly understood as the ability to dupe an ever-savvier consumer; a good advertiser is a good manipulator.) This fact implies that the common view of the role of the advertising industry is to outsmart the public.

This, we argue, is arrogant and unethical.

Loki: Patron Saint of Old Advertising [Image credit: Loke och Sigyn (1863) by Mårten Eskil Winge]

A properly ethical stance for an advertiser or designer to adopt is "the man in the middle" (rather than a bombastic pedagogue whose job it is to persuade or compel a viewer to purchase something by mastery). The lesson of social media to advertisers should be that consumers can and inevitably will make up their own minds. Brute force persuasion is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, and what remains is to persuade consumers by means of delivering verifiable information to them that is itself persuasive.

This feat requires a significantly more subtle and nuanced deployment of media, and, I would argue, a higher degree of emotional intelligence. In this way, it is anything but a lack of design challenge. On the contrary, in order to attain this most effective mode of corporate communication, designers must confront a public which they cannot underestimate.