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Now that we’ve gone back and established (at least a rough and ready version) of why ethical criteria are required when evaluating a design, and what exactly we mean when we say design, I’m sure you’ll agree it’s high time that we start to address what those criteria might be.

Particularly faithful readers of BlogLESS will remember our discussion of accountability in design ethics last October. The net result of that discussion was that designs should be evaluated by means of the effects they have on the world. Basically, the way we evaluate whether some design is good should depend on whether the consequences that design has on humans are positive or negative.

It should strike you as uncertain, however, how exactly we are proposing that we evaluate whether the consequences of some design are “positive” or “negative”. In other words: How do we know a design is right? That’s what I’m going to start thinking about this week.

Honey? HONEY?

A common example is instructive here. Imagine a graphic designer who creates magazine advertisements for pharmaceutical companies. She is hired to create an ad for a new drug which is designed to lower cholesterol, but which is also known to escalate the risks of heart disease and in rare circumstances, people taking the drug suddenly and unexpectedly die.

The dilemma is apparent. On one hand, a design is good if it effectively communicates the message of the client. On the other, it is good if it effectively communicates important information about the product to the ad’s readers. So the designer is faced with two apparently conflicting imperatives:

1. First, she could design the page in such a way that de-emphasizes the side-effects, relegating them to the “fine print.” This would, we can assume for the sake of the example, help the company to acheive the desired effect, and therefore could be called “good design.”
2. Otherwise, she could design the page in such a way as to serve the reader, not de-emphasizing the potential dangers of taking the drug, but rather putting them upfront, and leaving the choice to the reader. This would presumably have a detrimental effect to sales, but seems intuitively more responsible or ethical, and therefore could also be called “good design.”

This week, we’ll try to determine what our imperiled designer ought to do. Before we start that, though, two points are worth making.

First, some design-types might object that our heroine should merely opt out working for such a pharmaceutical company. I find this solution unacceptable, for at least two reasons:

1. We don’t always have the luxury of opting out of a client for ethical reasons. Designers design things to pay the bills, and the bills keep coming whether the work does or not. So we have to assume that like many designers, our protagonist does not have the financial liberty required to merely opt out.
2. Even if she did, the ethical tenability of her position would not be as clear-cut as it seems. Namely, that company will make an advertisement, whether it is designed by our protagonist, or by some second-choice designer. Since neither we nor she can know about the moral compass of this second choice, by opting out of the job, she may be enabling a less scrupulous or a less thoughtful individual to address the problem at hand. While it may be uncertain that this is precisely her responsibility, it is likewise in no way clear that it is not.

Second, you may object that this situation is too extreme. And of course you are right. Most of our design ethical decisions don’t involve the possibility of people just collapsing on the floor dead. I chose a relatively extreme example to highlight the problem clearly. It should still prove instructive, though, to more mundane examples; after all, the problem does boil down to choices about fonts.