Design Ethics

A while ago I was contacted by a someone who teaches design and was putting together a book that I gather is intended for students, who asked if I would contribute “a statement” about “ethics” in branding and design. I said sure, and I sent the essay below (it’s now more than a year old).

A few weeks later I heard back that what I had written was too “inflammatory.” “The design education community is an especially tightly-knit, small community,” the person told me, via email. “It’s important for me (as an educator) and for my audience for me to have good relations with professional organizations as well as with other design educators and writers who have contributed to the discipline.” I was shown a “redacted” version that essentially said nothing, and was asked if that version could be used instead. I said no, and that was the end of that.

I looked back at my original essay. Maybe it’s a little snotty – but inflammatory? I don’t think so. I certainly didn’t aim to inflame. I didn’t even intend to criticize anyone, per se. I was just trying to raise a few questions. Here it is; see what you think.

The cover of the 2003 book Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility, shows a clenched red fist. It’s an exciting image. Combined with that title, it suggests that being a designer is maybe a little bit like being an activist or societal change agent, someone with the power to make the world a better place. The back cover promises that the book “responds to the tough questions being asked by today’s designers,” including, “How can a designer effect social and political change?”

I’m not a designer. I’m a journalist, and to the extent that I deal with design I write about it from the consumer’s point of view – certainly design has an effect on what people buy and why they buy it. I know a few designers, and I’m aware that this whole notion of “responsibility” has been a significant topic in the profession in recent years, but I’ve never quite understood the way the debate is framed – and the cover image of Citizen Designer is a good example of what confuses me. That red fist doesn’t look to me like a symbol of weighty and serious “responsibility.” It looks to me like a symbol of thrilling and seductive power.

Inside, the first essay happens deliver what is probably the clearest assertion in the book: “We must stop inadvertently training our students to ignore their convictions and be passive economic servants.” If it’s true that design education is indifferent to values, then that writer is making an important argument: Designers need to think of the consequences of their work to the broader society. Making a cigarette package that appeals to children, for example, ought to be treated not as an abstract project, but as complicity in something that a designer who feels responsible for the effects of his or her work in the real world ought not do. Or to take another concrete example I’ve read, a designer might want to turn down an assignment to make a box appear to contain more product than it actually does, to trick the consumer. Or, using demeaning or offensive images – also bad.

But it seems to me that once the essential argument is made – basically, “snap out of your morally-neutral haze, you idiot” – then the concept of putting designer ethics into practice gets a lot more difficult, and never really leads to anything that I would say deserves a power-to-the-people, clenched-fist salute.

The International Association of Business Communicators offers a code of ethics that names these three “essential” principles:

• Professional communication is legal
• Professional communication is ethical
• Professional communication is in good taste

Well, “good taste” is such a subjective concept that I’m just going to skip it. And the insistence on not doing anything illegal is certainly fine by me, but seems pretty obvious and not worth elaboration. So that leaves the contention that professional communication – including the work of designers on behalf of their corporate clients – must be “ethical.” So what is ethical? There are 12 “articles” to this code, but they don’t offer the kind of clarity you might want. (“Professional communicators refrain from taking part in any undertaking which the communicator considers to be unethical.” Um, thanks.) But the response should not be to mock the IABC’s efforts, or to throw up your hands in despair. The unspoken problem is really a vital one: Ethics is something you are going to have to think about for yourself.

I can imagine that this is an easy thing to forget. Probably in any given design project, two points of view are going to predominate: Yours and the client’s. To some extent you and the client may be at cross purposes. The client is probably trying to sell something, you’re trying to make it look good by your own aesthetic standards (and probably no one needs to tell you to think about your own aesthetic standards — you’re a designer, after all). Because I am not designer, the only encouragement I can offer here is that you ought to think about the third party to the proceedings, the who has not been invited to participate but who is more important than you or your client: The end user, the viewer, the consumer. The rest of us, in other words.

This will not make your ethical thinking any easier. Consider this somewhat simplified version of a real example: A maker of cell phones introduces a new model, just like the old model, except that it’s green. Sales of the green version are very strong – so much so that the cell-phone maker can jack up its price to the consumer. Since the real cost of making the phone hasn’t changed, this increase is pure profit. If you’re the designer and you like the look of the green phone, you’re happy. The client, obviously, is happy, too. But what about the consumer?

For someone like me, the problem with so much of the thinking in Citizen Designer, and in most discussions of design ethics, is that by cloaking the issue of responsibility in the rhetoric of empowerment, it obscures the reality of ethical thinking. This is not a lofty intellectual enterprise; it’s gritty real-world decision-making, with tangible consequences. And the more it is intellectualized, the easier it is leave the consumer out of the thought process, and to come up with answers that do not add up to an ethical standard, but instead amount to a rationale. If you are a terribly clever thinker, you will find, it becomes possible to rationalize just about anything. This gets easier the bigger the client’s fees get, and it probably gets easier if your starting point is that the entire enterprise of designing is best represented by a fist clenched in activist-power salute. Come to think of it, the cover of Citizen Designer could itself be read as a kind of visual rationale, designed to seduce the prospective reader/designer into feeling that by picking up the book he or she is engaging the biggest quandaries of an important profession, head on.

The reality of design ethics is that the issues are rarely clear-cut. There is even a way to rationalize the pricey green phone: If the consumer is receiving greater aesthetic pleasure from it, and that pleasure has real economic value, then the price-hike is not just ethical, it’s rational. Maybe you buy that argument, and maybe you don’t. It’s up to you. That’s the whole point.