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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