If you accept my argument so far, then we've agreed that any design is subject to moral criticism, and that designers are beholden to take ethical considerations into account in their design decisions. In other words, that whether or not you design something in an ethical way, that thing will be judged as successful or not at least in part along ethical lines. This means that designers, insofar as they are self-interested (would like to continue to have careers in design), have good reasons to engage in ethical design practices.

This post is meant to introduce a wrinkle in that account, which works in the following way: I mentioned last week that our shared moral values are only one in a set of value domains to which a design is beholden. I was clear in that post that there are others: beauty and usefulness, I said. I want now to suggest a problem that this introduces.

Evening News, by Amy Bennett

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The goal of this post is to show that if I'm right so far, and our design decisions are sensitive to interpersonal criticism, then ethical considerations must be taken into account when we make them.

Two appeals

It's a pretty straightforward fact about most design that it needs to meet two different sets of interpersonal requirements: First, a good design has to function as a successful appeal to its consumers (users), and second, it has to meet the standards and requirements of its benefactors (call these benefactors, for brevity, clients). Since, for most of us, most of our clients that don't have some kind of de facto ethical status built-in (i.e. 501c3s, certain advocacy groups) are functionaries of their corporate stakeholders, the relevant set of values can only be those kinds of values that drive business success. In the case of almost any business I can think of, this boils down to making a successful appeal to consumers, and thus increasing profit. Since end users are the primary source of this profit, for the remainder of this thread, I'll take it that the relevant appeal that a designed object has to make is to its end users.

I take this to mean that designed objects reflect a position (a stance) relative to the set of their possible users. Namely, they reflect a claim about the value of this object in the lives of these users: This product will make you fitter, happier, more productive, etc.

Losing it, by Amy Bennett

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I wrote last week about the role of interpersonal justification in our ability to make assessments about good and bad design decisions. Some of you may have noticed that our friend Kush stopped by and suggested that there might be good therapeutic reasons for talking about design in terms other than "good" and "bad".

I disagree with this, although I think it is likely that our disagreement is at least partially motivated by differing conceptions of what it means for a design decision to be "good" or "bad". I wrote, in response to his comment, that bad design decision just is one that can't be justified to a "motivated, reasonable interlocutor." It's a fair question to ask, though, why it makes sense to think about badness as determined by a justificatory failure, rather than by some other standard.

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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?"

Coming to Grips, by Amy Bennett

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