My Sweets are candy bars designed by London-based Tithi Kutchamuch. Specifically, they are candy bars designed to aesthetically deliver you less candy.

From his statement:

Bargain food persuades people by playing with the value of money, which has brought a lot of problems to society: over nutrition, eating disorders, obesity, illness, guilt, wasting food, wasting resources, over production, etc.

Can design make people buy food that offers less?

Something to consider for this weekend: Is selling less candy like this really ethical?

John Stuart Mill was an early and influential proponent of utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is a kind of consequentialism that is classically concerned with maximizing happiness. What this means is that a course of action is considered good by utilitarian standards if its consequences provide more happiness for all the people they affect that would any other available alternative courses of action.^*

Who wouldn't want that, right? But the devil's always been in the details for utilitarianism, and this is complicated by a set of prior commitments that come with a design engagement.

Since that's what we care about here, I'll just talk about a long-standing problem for utilitarianism that's particularly relevant under the auspices of design. Namely, utilitarianism's seeming inability to account for personal projects.

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On Monday, we posed a situation in which a designer was trapped between fulfilling a client imperative ("help us sell more of this drug") and an ethical imperative (to let readers know about the risks associated with that drug). Most of us, when faced with that situation, will intuitively want to advocate for a middle road.

Middle roads, while famously intuitively satisfying (at least to people like us, reared on the indisputability of certain democratic ideals), rarely turn out as well as we expect them to.

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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.

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In 2003, Hollender invested SKr100,000 (around $12,500) in "unethical" companies — an arms manufacturer, as well as representatives of the tobacco, alcohol, pornography and gambling industries. He has thus far distributed SKr32,500 (around $4,000) in "scholarships" derived from the returns. The grants were awarded to visitors last month to "The Pål Hollender Foundation for Ethically or Aesthetically Offended Consumers of Culture" at Malmö Art Museum in southern Sweden.

Pål Hollender and his installation Death Equalizer, 2006 (via)

The reactions to this that I've seen tend to range from applauding the fund as social commentary to condemning it outright as mere provocation.

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