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A week ago Friday, I wrote a somewhat esoteric post about German idealism that ended up with me saying that any good code of design ethics will will have something to say about the practice of design in general.

This amounts, I think, to attributing at least two regulative goals for any given design: first, a design’s success should be assessed relative to how elegantly it solves the problems it was tasked to solve (in a vacuum, so to speak). Second, it should be judged by its net effect on the world we live in.

If the consequences of our designs are going to be counted, this means that we need to take our decisions very seriously. Since this is hard, we often find ourselves trying to deflect responsibility. This fact is nicely expressed by Milton Glaser, who is rapidly becoming my go-to guy:

In the new AIGA’s code of ethics there is a significant amount of useful information about appropriate behavior towards clients and other designers, but not a word about a designer’s relationship to the public.

Of course, this doesn’t merely apply to the AIGA code. Most designers, when asked about their professional ethics, will focus on business ethical questions, rather than confronting the value (be it intrinsic or consequential) of their practice itself. We, of course, believe strongly in the value of business ethics to a design practitioner, but we also find it important to relegate business and design ethics to separate domains. After all, business ethical questions don’t have much to do with design specifically.

So what do designers do that other contract-makers don’t? We make stuff. There it is, sports fans: When you deign to fill up our (that is, all of our) world with your new thing, you’re on the hook to think about the effect it’s going to have on all of us. Is the world going to be a worse place for your thing being in it?

And lest this discussion float forever in theoretical space, let’s tether it back to reality. Eighteen months ago, Kellogg voluntarily phased out advertising products to children under age 12 unless the foods meet specific nutrition guidelines. Even more famously, the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1970 banned all cigarette advertisements on American radio and television.

The arguments deployed in both cases is that there is a certain group of our population (children) who are so impressionable that they cannot be trusted to decide for themselves whether or not to use these horribly harmful products (cigarettes, sugar cereals).

This argument provides an interesting starting point for our discussion, and I’m going to talk more about it in my next posts, but for now simply notice that regardless of the fact that “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” elegantly solves R.J. Reynolds advertising problem, regardless of the fact that kids respond incredibly well to Joe Camel or Toucan Sam, these products of design were deemed unfit for the world at large.

Which means to me that, by popular consensus, these designs failed at an ethical level despite their practice-dependent successes.