Here's what I wrote on Monday:

Philosophical virtue ethics typically concern themselves with the inner states of individuals - an action counts as good because the agent who brings it about was motivated by a virtuous motivation. The analog of this is for design is the idea that a(n object of) design would count as good if the designer made her design choices in a virtuous way. I think that there is a perfectly reasonable concern about the applicability of this ethical model to design for the precise reason that designs and actions have very different ontological statuses.

Today, I'm going to articulate that difference, and illustrate it with one of the design virtues nearest and dearest to DLB's heart: economy.

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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.

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If your site or program fails, it's common courtesy not to leave your audience hanging. Acknowledge the problem. Offer an intelligible and honest explanation for the error; provide options to resolve the problem. In programming, this is known as failing gracefully. (A little humor doesn't hurt, either)

A popular example of graceful failure is Twitter's out-of-service page, colloquially known as the 'Fail Whale':

Twitter users see this image all too often, so it's a good thing it's such a clever piece.

Another type of failure is the 404 page, which a website serves up when it can't find an undefined or missing URL. It used to be an Easter Egg to design funny or philosophical 404's, but in researching this post, I found that either I didn't like most of the ones I found or the links I had for supposedly good ones were out of date. Perhaps it's gone out of style?

I did find one that made me chuckle:

And with that, we take our bow for the week. Thanks for joining us.

PS: If you're interested, Jeff Atwood has the whole 404 best-practices angle covered.

Quit Your Job

A young designer stopped by the studio the other day and as he sheepishly showed work he was doing ‘on the job,’ I flashed back to the last such ‘job’ I held in Baltimore.

I remembered a particular project (one I should have never been working on in the first place) that had degenerated into a situation where the client--some middle manager at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maryland--was standing behind me making me move type around etc...I remember insisting that we put a sunset on there just for spite.

I snapped out of it and told this designer to quit immediately, and that he would figure out how to pay his bills some other way. This is advice that I would have found difficult to follow when I was in a similar situation--making a steady paycheck--as I had to be fired before I finally made the decision to start working for myself.

I always wished I’d quit that last job, which is probably why I’ve held onto this piece-of-shit for 15 years.

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Flogged Magazine is a new magazine site dedicated to showcasing rejected designs, providing an outlet for those good designs that clients reject. You can download their issues here.

Similarly, you can get your failure therapy by joining and submitting to the Rejected Designs Flickr group, which is where I found this:

I thought these, by Metehan Ozcan, were nice.

Failure seems to surround us these days: the failure of the stock market; the banking industry; the automakers. On a personal scale, we might feel the pain of our lost retirements, jobs, and businesses. Even if we’re not technically in a depression, it’s certainly a depressing set of circumstances.

Why not be proactive, even optimistic, then? Rather than drowning in fear and shame over our defeats (or in anticipation of future defeats), we should remember the potential upsides to failure.

Fail confidently.

Failing is essential. Science is all about getting it wrong (at first). Most experiments don’t work at all. But those failures are necessary to arrive at the right answer. Ditto evolution. Failures of individuals and species result in adaptation and fitness to the environment. It’s a form of cognitive bias that we dwell upon the success stories without considering the contribution of messing up along the way.

In our lives, failure is a great teacher. Better than success most of the time. You're more likely to remember the questions you got wrong on a test than those you got right. Make a bad choice and suffer for it and you are less likely to make the same mistake again.

Sometimes we don’t take the hint that failure gives us. We blame bad luck or circumstances. Or worse, we stop trying. If we take responsibility and try again, every failure is an opportunity to discover something about yourself, your product, your company. Who knows? Maybe you're in the wrong business?

I am reminded of Mark Fenske’s missive Maybe You Suck.

Maybe advertising is your calling.
You should find that out.
…
Or, maybe you suck.
Equally important to discover.

Rather than hide or stigmatize failure, we ought to be honest about it. We should embrace it.

Homework: Read Paul Arden’s Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite. It’s practically a whole book on the topic.

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.

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