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Design Ethics

  • The Goods of Design. Professional ethics for designers - A book to read.
  • Just Design: Past, Present and Future Trajectories of Technology by Nassim Parvin - Another book to read.

Technology is everywhere but we don’t think about it. Sometimes we refuse the technology not for the technology itself but because of the ethic, the discussion behind it. 3 things about technology:

  • technology is a part of our existence

  • technology it is not neutral, but it doesn’t determine us and doesn’t define how we are

  • design is a way of doing ethics (what is ethics? it is a deeper research field than a set of rules we commit to.)

If we interpret technology we could see the value of a modern society, we can spot what’s important for the designers, the industry, the system, the people. Also shows what’s not, what’s been avoided. From any objects, you can see the values that are imbedded. Us and technology and interrelated

2 opposites view of technology:

  • Technological neutrality (for instance the slogan: guns don’t kill people / people kill people). This campaign wants to erase the function and the main aim of the gun production which is killing. A gun is not just any tool. It’s hard to define NEUTRALITY, because doesn’t mean a result in between good or bad, but it still have an effect so it cannot really be neutral. Design is purposeful.

  • Technological determinism: the other extreme! It’s a term coined by Veblen in 1920s. The idea was very well discussed by Marx in his book “Poverty of Philosophy”. This school believes that technology is the agent of social change, it moulds its behaviour and interactions. We find different ways to relate with technology so in a way we shape it too.

Both theories forget the relation and interaction between technologies and the socio-technical networks where we use and modify them. Technology amplifies the capacity for transformation and control that we have (which is never neutral again!)

Technologies co-shape our behaviour and participates in our decision making, we need to allow it to have a dimension, since that they have a clear moral dimension. It’s important the role of intermediation between humans and the world, the mediation of technology is in the perception and the actions.

Different type of mediations:

Embodiment relation: technology is connected to the human. A technology so close to the human that changes the way they behave. Examples: glasses, mobile phone, pen, watch. (Julio Cortazar - Paul Blackburn https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/blackburn/blackburn_translation_cortazar_cronopios.html)

Hermeneutic relation: the duo is technology and the world, technology represents the world. You don’t read the world but an interpretation of it, like reading the weather.

Alterity relation: when the technology becomes the mirror of interaction, you don’t interact with the world but with the technology itself like an ATM. There’s still an action to do from humans

Background relation: technology is there, there’s no action needed. Humans don’t interact neither interpret it. Like a heater.

Cyborg relation: similar to the embodiment but permanent, like body implants.

Mushstability: not neutral representation, like a fetus scan: you decode the sound and make a number out of it and it constitutes the fetus as a disabled person.

Technologies are not just one thing, are multistable. Everything is not just one thing.

Jevon’s paradox: when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use increases its demand, increasing, rather than reducing, resource use. The washing machine created a new standard of cleanness.

Areas of reflection:

goals: what for? for whose benefit?

design: how? with whom?

usage: how?

effects: unintended, unexpected, undesired?

Now design has a very problem solving mindset, modifying the shape of our life. Any challenge is seemed as a problem to be solved. We also saw nature as a resource and as a problem and we tried to fix it.

Design decisions:

  • Do our project moralise implicitly or explicitly? How?

  • What values are we inscribing / we want to inscribe in the design? What are the value tensions that emerge?

  • How are these tensions mitigated?

  • How are the values materialised into a design?

28/04 Technology responds to social forces

The normative dimension of design

Normative: when its basic use is prescribing norms or standards explicitly or implicitly. It’s present in deign. “Design is concerned with how things ought to be” by Herbert Simon in 1996. This means that design is a normative tool. When we’re designing we have an implicit idea of the good, of what is correct, of how things should be. Design materialises notions of the good and the right.

Design seeks to influence behaviour in a particular way and that’s why design is ethically relevant. Ethic is a world with many meanings around morality and moral decisions. It is understood to answer questions like what should I do or what’s the right thing to do? But then a whole different question is “what is good” which is not related to what is right. What does come first? The right or the good? Ethics is about how we should live and the meaning of a good life but also it’s about who we want to be.

Western approaches: Deontology: ethics of principles and rules. Inspired in the Bible.

Care ethics: good or bad, right or wrong are to be evaluated in how they support relations. It’s a relational ethics that involved caring for another.

Is design even a profession?

Professions are a moral projects, it’s not just about getting paid or doing the job well. This is not the goal. A good profession involves a commitment to something that is important. Design as a profession, what’s design’s purpose, what is design about? dismantle structural inequality and advance collective liberation and ecological survival (Design Justice, Sasha Costanza Chock) but this is not specific enough, this can be for any profession. Papanek says that everything is design. Ezio Manzini in When Everybody Design says that designer are there to support a process and not to say what to do, so to trigger and support open ended co design processes, but also this thought can be applied to very negative and non ethics purposes.

It is extending other’s possibilities, potentialities and capabilities through the conceiving and planning of the human made world.

What are capabilities? Answers to questions / genuine opportunity to achieve a functioning, an actual freedom to live the kind of life a person has reason to value.

Last update: June 13, 2023