Ken Garland's famous 1962 Easter March poster for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Ken Garland's First Things First manifesto is no doubt a classic in design ethics. Garland - art editor of Design magazine, proprietor of Ken Garland & Associates, and active member of the socialist Labour Party - wrote the manifesto was in November, 1963. The early sixties in Britain were a time when readily-available consumer goods were both changing the consumer landscape forever and simultaneously enabling corporations to lavish enormous production budgets, unheard of in the austere post-war years, on designers and advertisers. Four hundred copies of First Things First were published in January 1964, signed by several well-established design figures, as well as a host of other teachers, students, designers and photographers.

(For a fuller history of the manifesto, check out Rick Poyner's Design is about democracy.)

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Last week, we talked about two types of theories which we could potentially use to evaluate the ethical qualities of a designed object. Consequentialist theories, we said, are more ends-focused: a design fails to be ethical if it has unethical consequences, even if those consequences weren't predicted by the designer. Deontological theories, on the other hand, say that since the design decisions are morally fallible, we have to grade ethical content based largely on a designers' intentions.

Milton Glaser most famously designed this "I Love New York" logo.

This discussion is part of a larger attempt to slog our way toward a stance about design ethics. We want to do this because we think design ethics are important, and this week, we're going to focus on exactly why they're important. Particularly, Nick is going to start developing that project on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.

While he does that, I plan to start introducing some of the canonical texts in the history of design ethics, under the snappy new tag of the DLB Design Ethics Compendium. The idea of the Compendium is that we'll be able to use some of what other great designers have written to either support or argue against whatever systematic positions we arrive at. I'll start that today, with Milton Glaser's The Road to Hell.

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