Sculpture/signage designed by Milton Glaser for the SVA Theater.

The new SVA graphic identity, also by Glaser, reflecting the sculpture above.

In an interview about the renovation, Glaser discusses his past architectural designs, the inspiration for his work with the SVA, and the challenges of working with space. It's worth a read to hear him talk about architecture with the same thoughtfulness he displays towards graphic and identity design.

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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This is a kind of half of a post. It's really an invitation to read This is what I have learned (PDF) by Milton Glaser for the AIGA National Design Conference, "Voice" in 2002. Here, he condenses 50 years of practical design wisdom into ten succinct, often counter-intuitive points. I will merely list the points, but I promise, each one is worth a read.

1. You can only work for people that you like.
2. If you have a choice never have a job.
3. Some people are toxic avoid them.
4. Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.
5. Less is not necessarily more.
6. Style is not to be trusted.
7. How you live changes your brain.
8. Doubt is better than certainty.
9. Solving the problem is more important than being right.
10. Tell the truth.

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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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