Blogless

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.