Milton Glaser on Design Ethics (2/3)
Design Less Better recently had the opportunity to talk to one of our favorite designers, Milton Glaser, about our favorite topic, design ethics.
Design Less Better was very grateful for the opportunity to sit down with Milton Glaser recently and talk about his views on design ethics. This interview was originally posted over the course of three days. You are currently reading the second of three. You can read the whole interview here.
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DLB: Truth-telling and hypocrisy are obviously important to you. In fact, famously, your Road to Hell test gives designers a way to establish their level of discomfort with bending the truth. It helps designers figure out what they're willing to do for a job. On that note, can you tell us about a time when you turned down or gave up a job for ethical reasons?
MG: All moral questions are sensitive to the context in which they arise. I can't recall a specific idea I gave up, but I will say that it is a single overriding element in my life to do my best to avoid lying to people, misrepresenting things to people, or doing things that I think would have bad consequences. But as you know it is not easy to determine the consequences of any act. As the Buddhists say, "good yields bad, bad yields good".
It is not a simplistic series of catchphrases that we want to be concerned with. You have to take people's intentions into account. Experience often shows that things that you think will be helpful to someone turn out to be harmful to them, and things you think will injure them turn out to strengthen them. So we cannot diminish the complexity of these issues nor do we want to make it simplistic. But I do know that I feel better when I benefit the people I communicate with and I'm deeply embarrassed and feel awkward and inauthentic when the work I do ends up hurting people in any way.
I can't talk about individual cases of course, although I'm constantly turning down work that I think is harmful. But so much is harmful that it's easy to leave yourself without a basis for your economic life, and that, of course, is the conflict that everybody faces. Everything is a matter of degrees and not absolutes. I will say that as a general principle, I attempt to be truthful and not do harm. How that works on individual cases is very often a complex story.
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DLB: In several of your AIGA talks, you have been a very staunch advocate of the importance of ethical thinking for designers. But, outside of a few isolated instances, there does not seem to be a great deal of professional concern about this issue. Do you find that designers seem resistant to talking about ethics, and if so, why do you think that is?
MG: Well, I think it's difficult to talk about ethics. In part, it's difficult because designers are very often pressed into situations where ethical considerations are in conflict with financial needs. If you're earning $300,000 a year and you've got two kids in school, leaving BP would be a very difficult decision. And everybody in life — except for saints and maybe those who are more obsessive than anyone I know — has to compromise in order to balance the elements of their life, and has to arrive at conclusions which don't hurt them too much ethically, financially, personally and so on.
It's very difficult to put yourself in a position where you're telling someone else to be more virtuous, to be better or more ethical or as ethical as you are. I hate that crap. I hate the kind of ethical baloney that people talk about in their presentation, and then it turns out that they don't live their life that way. And it's not something you want to check on in others. All I can say is that you have to determine in your life when you're willing to lie and what you're willing to lie for. It is not a question of absolute decisions. Every decision is relative to everything else that is in your life at the time.
But one of the terrible dangers of ethical discussions is that they soon shift to posing and then it's like listening to politicians on television. Where does all that preening and posing and posturing come from? The idea of appearing ethical seems to be something that is attractive to people but then when you penetrate the appearance and get to the actual reality of what's going on, it turns out frequently to be something very different. So I hate to put myself in the position, among others, of saying "I'm an ethical person you should be more like me" because I recognize that everyone is compromised in their lives.
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