1. Perhaps needless to say, I think having philosophers working in design is just obviously a good idea. But why?

2. What makes a good designer? For my money, most of what good designers do is look at the world (or a certain very small subset of it) and try to figure out how it ought to be. Think about that. An Eames chair is just a claim about how chairs ought to look, feel and so on. And they're so damn popular among designers because we all, in our considered professional opinions, agree with that claim. "Yup," we think, "the world is a better place because of that thing. The Eames boys really had something worth saying about how the world ought to be."

3. With practical philosophers, this is even more explicit. They are concerned entirely with figuring out what it means to claim that the world ought to be some way rather than another, and with figuring out ways to systematize their thinking in order to capture our intuitions and theories about that.

4. So what designers can take for granted (that they've got it right about the way the world ought to be), philosophers make explicit. That means there are two ways to be a good designer. Either you've just got spot-on intuitions, or else you do some practical philosophy to tune up those intuitions. And I think most of us can use a regular tune-up.

5. I think a lot of bad design is based on lazy, solipsistic thinking on the part of designers. When we all look at something and think that we were better off without it, or we'd be better off with something else, what we're thinking is that the normative claim the designed object represents is just wrong.

6. Which is all to say that if designers are interested in getting it right systematically, what they're interested in is scrutinizing their intuitions. You can do that with a lot of different tools: cognitive science, experimental psychology, design theory, and so on. But if you want to get down to the kind of skills that undergird those disciplines, there's only one place to go.

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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I argued on Monday that since we are more complex agents than the rules of our professions dictate, extrinsic ethical concerns can be relevant to our professional practices. Today, I want to show that our practices, merely by virtue of taking place in a context of ethically-bound agents, and having these same agents as participants, develop internal ethical criteria.

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I ended up Wednesday settling on a working definition of "design" as something like that special practice of making something that's desirable, viable, commercially successful and adds value to people's lives.

Upon further reflection, I realized that I may have been so pleased with those items as criteria for picking out design quality, that I overlooked their clear shortcomings as a definition of design. Why, exactly? Well, where being desirable, viable, commercially successful, and adding value to people's lives may be excellent criteria for picking out good designs from bad, they're hardly useful for picking out a design from non-designs. After all, if every design was commercially successful, we'd all be a lot richer. Which means that they aren't, after all, necessary criteria.

So we'll have to go it alone. After a couple of days further thought, I've decided I'd prefer something like design is the practice of creating an object that is normatively understood to serve primarily commercial purposes. While that's certainly not as pithy as some of its forebearers, it seems to me critical to definitionally couch design practice in a historical and social context, which none of them do.

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