I spent Monday talking about making our first shaky steps toward a so-called deeper design ethics. I drew a distinction between generic professional or business ethics, and the special kind of ethical concerns we have as people who fill up the world with the stuff we make.

In that post, I specifically mentioned two types of advertising campaigns -- those for Kellogg's sugary breakfast cereals, and those for tobacco products -- both of which were pulled from television and print media because of the consensus view that it is our duty to protect those members of our society who are so impressionable that they cannot be trusted to decide for themselves whether or not to use the harmful products that these advertisements were trying to sell them. Of course I am referring to children.

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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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