The Role of Justification in Design
If we're going to attempt a theory of design ethics, we'd better be clear about how, exactly, we know whether a design choice is a good one or a bad one.
It seems appropriate to start again where most of us learned to how to think about design: the undergraduate critique.
A design critique is a pedagogical tool, an activity meant to teach students something. Critique is a way to give young designers some new knowledge or insight into design practice. As many of you will remember (some of you no doubt from quite recent experience) this works in something like the following way.
A student presents some piece of work to other students and professors. Those peers and teachers try to explain to the presenter what about the object at hand is good and what is bad. By hearing these things, the designer learns and -- hopefully -- goes on to use that acquired knowledge to refine her practice, that is, to design better things.
Today, I am interested in asking where exactly the critique participants acquire the knowledge that they use to criticize a designed object. In other words, what gives them the right to make claims about the goodness or badness of a design?
The answer is of course their own knowledge about design, which -- I think you will find, uniformly -- is itself acquired in turn by more interpersonal justification by means of rational criticism, either in the form of previous critiques, or in books, lectures and so on. The claim I am making is that all claims about good and bad design derive from what is ostensibly a global-historical process of design critique.
The apparent circularity of the fact that rational criticism about design is enabled by more rational criticism about design might trouble some. Their worries, I imagine, might be something along the lines of "what makes any of the criticism meaningful if all that's backing it up is more criticism?" Or, more pointedly, "what justifies our knowledge about good and bad design? What makes us right?"
