How do we make ethical decisions about our designs? To start this week, we look at a classic example: a magazine ad for a new prescription drug.
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.
Read More...
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Paul — Mar 2, 2009
Hot on the heels of Monday's look at a a bout of undeserved frenzy over what I interpret as a relatively undramatic bit of artistic social commentary, I've just been handed a slip of paper alerting me to Swedish performance artist and filmmaker Pål Hollender, whose supposed moral dilemma is a bit higher stakes.
In 2003, Hollender invested SKr100,000 (around $12,500) in "unethical" companies — an arms manufacturer, as well as representatives of the tobacco, alcohol, pornography and gambling industries. He has thus far distributed SKr32,500 (around $4,000) in "scholarships" derived from the returns. The grants were awarded to visitors last month to "The Pål Hollender Foundation for Ethically or Aesthetically Offended Consumers of Culture" at Malmö Art Museum in southern Sweden.
Pål Hollender and his installation Death Equalizer, 2006 (via)
The reactions to this that I've seen tend to range from applauding the fund as social commentary to condemning it outright as mere provocation.
Read More...
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Paul — Dec 17, 2008
DLB kicks off a week-long discussion about failure with a meta-blog post about glitch and responsibility.
Mistakes are made. Technology fails. Deadlines are blown. Variables are left unaccounted for. In short, shit happens: unavoidably, inevitably. But what do we designers do when it does?
Glitches from a Google cache search in a tab of a crashing instance of Firefox (Via)
This week on BlogLESS, we'll take a look at some instructive instances of failure, and see what we can learn from them. We've talked up the importance of accountability in design ethics here on BlogLESS before, and anticipating failure and accounting for it gracefully is right at the heart of good design.
Read More...
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Paul — Dec 8, 2008
Continuing this week's series on design ethics, DLB borrows from The West Wing to help develop the case for accountability.
I've been thinking for a few days now about how I would respond to Paul's most recent weekend ponderable.
His question was: What if you went out of your way to design an ecologically-friendly MP3 player, but in doing so, inadvertently caused the manufacturing contract to be outsourced, costing American jobs? In short, can a design be ethical despite having unethical consequences?
Whether we design sustainably or not, our decision is going to do harm to someone. As I see it, we should choose the option which does the most good for the most people-- i.e. design the MP3 player with recycled materials because, ultimately, it's better for everyone. Being environmental, in this case, is a higher obligation.
Fair enough, but how does one do that?
Read More...
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Nick — Oct 23, 2008
If design is "taking into account," then designers are on the line for the effects of our design choices.
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).
Read More...
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Paul — Oct 22, 2008
