Here's one for the books (and for the DLB taxonomy of unethical designs). According to a recent AP article, parents who install Sentry and FamilySafe brand software to monitor their children's online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children's instant messages, and sell gathered marketing data from them.

via.

The rest of this post writes itself.

If you accept my argument so far, then we've agreed that any design is subject to moral criticism, and that designers are beholden to take ethical considerations into account in their design decisions. In other words, that whether or not you design something in an ethical way, that thing will be judged as successful or not at least in part along ethical lines. This means that designers, insofar as they are self-interested (would like to continue to have careers in design), have good reasons to engage in ethical design practices.

This post is meant to introduce a wrinkle in that account, which works in the following way: I mentioned last week that our shared moral values are only one in a set of value domains to which a design is beholden. I was clear in that post that there are others: beauty and usefulness, I said. I want now to suggest a problem that this introduces.

Evening News, by Amy Bennett

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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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It's always a thrill to read something that's nicely written by someone with whom you have some core value overlap. Thoughtful industrial designer Robert Blinn over at Core77 recently offered us the opportunity to do just that. Here's a sample:

If our response to our environmental debts is anything like our response to the current recession, we can be reasonably sure not only that the market will seek to correct it, but also that the response will come late, painfully, and with warnings that are only obvious in retrospect. Instead of waiting, perhaps we should fix our definitions of the economy, our definitions of growth, and most importantly our definitions of happiness today. Wouldn't you rather be making beautiful things of lasting value anyway?

Indeed. Blinn's article is full of similar sentiments, many of which I recognized from the DLB playbook. (He actually says at one point: "Make less. Make it better.")

I probably wouldn't have posted about this article in particular though, except for the fact that DLB is currently in the process of hiring someone to help us develop our business. We're doing some interviews this week, and this lovely sentiment caught my eye: "Don't let people who aren't involved in building your company get involved in selling it."

I think that ought to be an iron law for every little design firm.

The whitepaper on Civil Branding compares the role of brands in today's society with those of church and state in the past. Brands now "engage [in] wider conversations about how we should think about ourselves as a society." They play a primary role in informing what we find important, and help us tune our perspectives on it. God help me, I think this is right. But the conclusion - that it is the duty of marketers to help brands advertise with value-based messages, to promote good values - is dead wrong.

When marketers suggest that companies undertake vague, value-based advertising campaigns that are contradicted by their unethical business practices, they are promoting a culture where values are handed down by institutions lacking the moral authority to do so. When companies use advertising to promote values that they don't instantiate, they drain the meaning out of those values.

Making value-based promises requires moral authority. If you're a marketer, and you help a company promote a value it doesn't instantiate, you're cheapening that value. You're making a world in which that value means less.