Ethics matter, a designer point of view
Episode two. “We designed the combustion engine that led to global warming […]. We designed guns that kill school children. We design shitty interfaces to protect our private information. […] We designed social networks without any way of dealing with abuse or harassment.” (2019, Mike Monteiro). What could be the bond between the designers' role and the ethics behind their contribution?
As I have introduced in the previous blog post, we are systematically incentivising unsustainable behaviours, destroying ecosystems and communities with solutions we have ourselves created. To keep growing, a system dependent on economic growth must continually convert nature into goods and relationships into services, things once provided to us as gifts become monetised transactions. In this scenario, my intent wants to outline the service design limits and opportunities to define possible innovations in a worn ecosystem. The mission of this study is defining the service designer ethical dimension in a consumeristic reality and possibly identifying a framework for a sustainable economy based on cooperation through people and relationships.
Most of the horrible things happening on this planet, and even more are going to happen, are the consequence of awful design decisions. We designed an ecosystem that advantages the competitivity rather than the collaboration between parts. All of that, it’s possible because we didn’t do what we could to stop it. And maybe, it is a good time to ask ourselves how we got here, what our role was in getting here, finally wondering how to avoid similar conditions too. The interest to do the right thing and enough time to realize it represents a central element of this scenario. Involvement in creating the surrounding ecosystem makes our professions collectively complicit in a root cause of global warming, even as we individually strive to secure a place in this new constellation. Instead, we find ourselves in a defensive position, immersed in a new vocabulary, measuring our actions in terms of emissions, mitigation, balancing and offsetting. However, it is increasingly evident that the solutions do not lie only in the new regulations, in the new standards. Powerful actions require an equally incisive vision and imagination. Our condition of being on the back foot does not help, but we can’t just act out of guilt about what we’ve done, out of fear of what might happen, and regret what we may have lost. We need to establish a new relationship with society and the environment, defined by a clear purpose and a desire to evolve.
The challenge is not only to protect our natural environment but to realign our attitude and our role within the system that depends on us and on how we behave.
According to many designers and in particular, Mike Monteiro, what we choose to design (as an act of responsibility) is less relevant than what we choose to not design and even more important it is what we exclude from the design process. Embracing some kind of principles is essential to define the people we are and this is not only an individual decision, but it could represent an entire company (Google’s mantra “Don’t be evil” is a disastrous example).
As a designer, do the right thing
As designers, we have an ethical responsibility to the entire ecosystem that we design within. Whom we work for and how we do that work are the only things that matter right now. Our job concerns all the values on both sides of the environment: those who hire us and society. When we find ourselves working in a system that favours one side of the equation over others, it is our job to correct the system. For that reason, our goal should be in the first place to determinate the ethics of the situation, then when designing something imagine that the relationship to that service gets agreed after you have made it. We should be really interested in what is happening in practice and be aware of what is happening in the real world.
The design world is not the only space that is questioning its inherent complexity and in particular concerning the ethics of economic policymaking. Ethics is the core of several professions, such as medicine, that combine the uncertainty in intervening in a complex system (the human body and the health care system) with having responsibilities for evident impacts upon other people’s lives. Pointing attention to the economy’s complexity, we can not exempt from considering the ethics of economic policymaking. Nowadays, economists decide the management of entire countries or macro-areas and our global households, profoundly affecting the lives of us all. So, even if it is recognized or not, when a discipline influences others, it necessarily takes on ethical implications and it is vital to understand its responsibilities.
For the past couple of decades, the sustainable movement has pressed designers to stop thinking about their products through a logic of commodification, addressing even more the ecological impact of their choices. To be more precise, these effects of a product, service or system is decided at the design stage at least for 80 percent. Comparing the environmental impact of various products has become a core business for someone and thanks to life-cycle analysis, or LCA, which is an attempt to quantify a product’s effects on the planet, from greenhouse gas emissions to acid rain, it is possible to express a completely different value of a product or service. Through a service perspective, it’s possible to drive the design into an analysis of the usage of raw material, the shipping strategy, thinking about an alternative to storage and comprehend the implications after the cycle of life of the products. Innovative companies are already doing that and they are profiting thanks to a decisive competitive advantage. It is what some leaders describe as the crucial jump taking the process of intentional creation and applying it beyond discrete products to solve wicked problems using a systemic approach and design thinking methodology.
We need to do one step forward. I’m already aware the logic of the consumer has been moved from being just a passive user to an active participant in the ideation process; at the same time, we know we shifted the attention to new principles seeking to different implications. So, the idea could be to emphasise the value of asking ethical questions during the brief generation (designer role) and the process of business definition. That is in contrast with a sequence where ethical enquiries beginning only after the roles in the game are fixed. When it is possible, we should stop and reflect on the effects of what we are doing. Thant’s probably not enough, very often it is no just a matter of thinking on material consequences, but probably we need to face something broader: why are we design this? Who are we designing this for? How will we track the success of our intervention? Do we really need to achieve this?
The logic of these posts is simple, people who make design decision has to be considered as a designer, even if there are not aware of doing so. In the fluid society and ecosystem we live in, potentially everybody can contribute to change the world. So, be conscious of our duties and responsibilities it’s even more important, reflect on our interventions and thinking about the long term is the first step: who is involved? Who could be excluded? Are we harming someone?
