1. The Ethics of 3D

Creative Commons photo by Jim Frost

3D seems to be everywhere these days, but is it bad for us? ABC blogger Mark Pesce thinks it might be.

Exposure to the kind of fake-3D we see in movies and video games can affect a person's real-world depth perception. Unless a different technology comes along, Pesce argues that viewing 3D in this way for long periods of time could cause permanent perceptual damage(!).

But the media companies must have thought of this, right? Not really:

All of this is rolling forward without any thought to the potential health hazards of continuous, long-term exposure to 3D. None of the television manufacturers have done any health & safety testing around this. They must believe that if it's safe enough for the cinema, it's fine for the living room. But that's simply not the case. Getting a few hours every few weeks is nothing like getting a few hours, every single day.

To follow up on this question of ethics, what about 3D accessibility, as well?

Even if it proves to be harmless (which I doubt -- more on that next week), as it turns out, some people can't see 3D. It bears noting than an experience should not require 3D, or one risks excluding at least some of the audience.

As designers, it seems as though we ought to be more careful in our application of 3D.

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1. Ten Graphic Design Paradoxes

A call for designers to take greater responsibility, Design Observer delivers a hefty dose of reality in this list. It's not the clients or the projects, but how we respond to them that make a heaven or hell of our work.

Number 10 is especially relevant:

If we believe in nothing, we shouldn’t wonder why no one believes in us. In a world with no principles, people respect those who have principles. Impersonating a doormat is a poor way to be an effective graphic designer. In fact, standing up for what we believe in — ethics, morality, professional standards, even aesthetic preferences — is the only way to produce meaningful work. Of course we won’t win every time, but we will win more often than the designer who doesn't believe in anything. There are countless ways in which we can demonstrate professional integrity — the only mistake we can make is not to demonstrate any.

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Cliff Kuang recently wrote a piece at GOOD Magazine that takes after my own heart.

He tells a nice story about his recent experience at a "green" themed consumer electronics show in New York. At the show, he was offered an application for a green credit card. The card awarded one ton of carbon offsets for every $1000 spent by the card holder. One ton of carbon offsets is worth $8-12 dollars.

Most credit card holders will recognize that a $10 return (on average) per thousand spent is a very cheap reward relative to most other (airline mileage or cash-based) credit card reward programs. (For those who don't: most programs return $25-50 of value per thousand spent.) The response of the booth's attendant, when questioned: "...it doesn't really matter what it costs, for people that care about green."

This kind of emotional blackmail is just what I hate about the green design movement: It uses an important value (ecology) as a way to take advantage of unthinking consumers. It's bad enough that the value itself is cheapened in the process, but it's truly awful to consider that the consumer actually ends up paying to cheapen it.

The reason that the green credit card provides such a potent example of this phenomenon is because it's not just more bullsh*t -- it's actually internally contradictory. It incentivizes people to increase their consumption level, a behavior which in all likelihood negatively overcompensates for the relatively negligible good of the reward.

In other words, it rewards you (and relatively poorly, remember, you're subsidizing this reward) to engage in ecologically destructive behavior with less potent ecologically beneficial dividends.

Kuang's lesson here is an important one: "being 'green' is chiefly about your behavior and daily habits." Rest assured that no credit card is sufficiently motivated to help you with those.

A recent New York Times article showcases the so-called "social design" (alt. "service design") phenomenon. Social design, apparently, is a sort of hybrid practice that applies the creative approaches traditionally associated with professional designers alongside the research approaches of ethnographers, anthropologists, and sociologists to create novel solutions to social problems.

This is certainly an interesting territory for designers (reminiscent, philosophy heads will recognize, of the great Critical Theory movement as defined in the Frankfurt school in the 1930s and 40s) and I would argue it is also one whose every potential engagement will be an incredibly high-stakes ethical proposition.

Consider the Times' example: The ReD Associates social design firm (comprised of designers alongside ethnographers, etc.) was asked by the city of Copenhagen to propose solutions to improve the rate of employee sick leave in the city's offices. Apparently, sick leave was costing the government something on the order of $140 million per year.

The firm found that a third of all of employee sick leave was motivated psychologically -- mostly low morale -- rather than by poor employee health (e.g. caused by physical stressors in the work environment). That is a tragic, Kafkaesque fact, and there's no doubt that design brains could be put to good use in addressing it. The tragic nature of the problem is also what makes the ethical stakes so high in developing a design solution. The Times writes:

ReD suggested various measures...intended to coax absentees back to work. After four weeks' absence, each employee has a formal discussion with a manager, who will be encouraged to consider whether he or she would benefit from changes in the working environment, or from edging back to work by returning part time.

Which I read, sadly, in the following way: Rather than address endemic problems of office culture, the designers put procedures in place to provide therapy or threats to downtrodden office workers. Of course this worked: the Times reports that "the sick-leave numbers are already heading in the right direction -- downwards." But is it a good design solution?

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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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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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Mistakes are made. Technology fails. Deadlines are blown. Variables are left unaccounted for. In short, shit happens: unavoidably, inevitably. But what do we designers do when it does?

Glitches from a Google cache search in a tab of a crashing instance of Firefox (Via)

This week on BlogLESS, we'll take a look at some instructive instances of failure, and see what we can learn from them. We've talked up the importance of accountability in design ethics here on BlogLESS before, and anticipating failure and accounting for it gracefully is right at the heart of good design.

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