May Cause Sudden Death
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.
| Tagged with: | Accountability, Consequentialism, Design Ethics, Drugs, Fonts, Graphic Design, Moral Dilemmas, Rightness, The Magazine Ad Example |