Design and Ethics

Reflections on Practice

Emma Felton, Oksana Zelenko, Suzi Vaughan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136342639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The value of design for contributing to environmental solutions and a sustainable future is increasingly recognised. It spans many spheres of everyday life, and the ethical dimension of design practice that considers environmental, social and economic sustainability is compelling.

Approaches to design recognise design as a practice that can transform human experience and understanding, expanding its role beyond stylistic enhancement. The traditional roles of design, designer and designed object are therefore redefined through new understanding of the relationship between the material and immaterial aspects of design where the design product and the design process are embodiments of ideas, values and beliefs.

This multi-disciplinary approach considers how to create design which is at once aesthetically pleasing and also ethically considered, with contributions from fields as diverse as architecture, fashion, urban design and philosophy. The authors also address how to teach design based subjects while instilling a desire in the student to develop ethical work practices, both inside and outside the studio.

PART I

Perspectives on design
and ethics

1

FRAMING DESIGN
AND ETHICS

Oksana Zelenko and Emma Felton

Design is undergoing a reconceptualization triggered by debates about its potential to instigate meaningful social, cultural and environmental change. Simultaneously, design and the allied design-based industries are experiencing a vigorous ascendancy across many spheres of life. While our collective aesthetic is finely tuned to contemplate and consume all things designer, innovations in digital media are generating new dimensions in the design realms – spawning new industries and aesthetic developments. From designer kitchens and clothes to technology and landscapes, our senses have become hard-wired to appreciate the nuances and aesthetics of the visual.

At the same time, a growing consensus about environmental fragility, and how practices of production and consumption are contributing to an unsustainable future, underpins a discourse that sees the potential of design to be transformative or ‘redirective’ (Fry 2009). There is little disagreement that we are witnessing an ‘ethical turn’ occurring in professional and allied practices, including the design fields. This reconceptualization extends design's role – and that of practitioners’ responsibility – beyond stylistic enhancement, or the quest for optimal product solutions, to account for the aesthetic dimensions of human experience and consequences of creative decision-making underpinning design processes. The traditional roles of design, designer and designed object are thus redefined through new understandings of the relationship between the material and immaterial aspects of design, where the design product and process are understood as embodiments of ideas, values and beliefs. This notion brings to the fore central questions around social responsibility, sustainability and consideration for the life of the object beyond the design studio.

The practice of ethics as a mode of being shaped by socially determined attitudes and beliefs is positioned beyond any single disciplinary perspective. Taking a cross-disciplinary approach to ethics requires a recognition of the plurality of opinions, practices and socio-cultural perspectives, and the opportunity to open established value systems to questioning and renegotiation. This approach to ethics can be regarded as one of critical ethics (Colebrook 1999) where key questions about who creates the codes, how and in what context, shape the debate. In this sense, critical ethics is a dynamic ethics based in awareness and responsibility and representative of the flux, context and negotiation in process. It is through this lens that we hope you will view Design and Ethics: Reflections on practice as a multidisciplinary approach to the topic, which paradoxically does not diminish the primacy of any individual disciplinary specialization, but rather, by virtue of juxtaposition with other disciplines, amplifies and increases the visibility of viewpoints. The aim is to create a space for critical engagement in which contrasting, contradictory views are a necessary part. The value of the cross-disciplinary approach is in the intersections between disciplines that are not necessarily evident from publications based in a single discipline.

The pressures of finding sustainable solutions to complex problems increasingly requires practitioners to operate beyond their disciplinary specialization. This process demands a pedagogical framework that has a strong ethical foundation enabling practising and prospective professionals to cultivate an awareness of, and critical engagement with, value systems, professional codes and social standards. Many contributors to this volume, who are both design practitioners and educators, endorse an ethics of design in their pedagogical practice, illustrating the limitations and potential for this approach.

The chapters collected here are multidisciplinary excursions in and around the two triggers of ‘design’ and ‘ethics’, in which ethics is interpreted in ways that transcend the specificity of disciplines and practices. The chapters are organized in five parts, with this, the first chapter in Part I, offering a traditional philosophical frame work that serves to anchor the diversity of perspectives and disciplines presented on the topic. The collection then moves through the practices of interaction and visual design, architecture, urban planning and fashion, and concludes with a provocation on the potential of design's future. Each disciplinary cluster attempts to create vignettes of practitioners’ reflections on practice alongside theoretical perspectives from non-practitioners, allowing the reciprocity and dynamics shaping theory and practice to become more apparent. From a practitioner's perspective, ethics as applied to the various design fields is both a process of constant negotiation that recognizes the inherent messiness of collaboration and consensus as well as a mechanism for addressing these complexities. In efforts to ensure sustain able outcomes in design practice, as writers and practitioners point out, the authority of, and commitment to, a sustainable future is paramount.

The ethical concerns positioned at the intersection of design practice and design pedagogy are charted in Stephen Loo's chapter, ‘Design-ing ethics: the good, the bad and the performative’, which presents a layered ordering of the complex philosophical terrain that spans the field of design and moral theory. Incorporating traditional forms of philosophical enquiry, the first order utilizes Aristotelian and deontological approaches in a way that frames the design and educative process in an ethical context. The second order looks to the designer as human citizen beyond disciplinary or professional boundaries, while the third order charts the triadic relationship between human subjects, constructed objects and the environment.

In this framework, Loo interrogates the ontological status of design as it relates to ethical considerations, the importance of which, for Loo, lies in design's function as a mediator of ‘people-to-people relations’. The difference between ‘good design’ and the more contested idea of ‘ethical value’ presents an epistemological conundrum for educators and practitioners alike. Because ethics in moral theory is more likely to involve concepts of the ‘good’ and the ‘right’, it follows that design tends to become defined as ‘ethically sound’, which assumes particular functional qualities such as accessibility, usefulness and safety, all of which arrive from a moral imperative. The circularity of this way of thinking, for Loo, requires us to think differently about ethics and design, towards the idea of design as performative ethics. This requires the designer to re-evaluate actively and constantly their role in the design process.

Drawing on her experience as a practitioner and educator in ‘Design, ethics and group myopia’, Leslie F. Becker would endorse the idea of performative ethics, although she expresses this idea in the context of critical reflection, for practitioners and educators. Professional practitioners tend to produce group affinities and myopia – shared assumptions and values – that create certainties and biases, which reproduce ideas about what is ‘right action’, but in actuality can often be an impediment to ethical action. Becker's thirty years’ experience brings to her chapter a varied and rich tapestry of trends in design practice and thinking that are both perennial and evolving. Becker suggests that, despite the recent ascendancy of ethics in the public sphere and across the disciplines, an improvement in human and environmental flourishing is not yet evident. Debates about the value of art and culture, and ergo, design to society are perennial. Justin O'Connor takes this up in his discussion on the repositioning of art and culture in the framework of ‘creative industries’ – a term that first appeared in the mid 1990s and arose from the United Kingdom's Labour government and is now more widely adopted in other countries. In ‘From allure to ethics: design as a “creative industry”’, O'Connor suggests that the creative industries’ framework, as a strategy for economic and commercial development, positions ‘design’ so that it becomes a broker for art and industry – and that this has implications for design to function in an ethical capacity.

In other contemporary reconceptualizations of design, Karen Fiss, at the start of Part II, questions the recent claims of design to instigate significant change, especially in relation to projects deemed socially responsible. Socially responsible projects frequently involve intercultural negotiation and, in the case of graphic design, the question of cultural difference produces its own set of ethical considerations. In ‘Hybridity, hegemony and design in a globalized economy’, Fiss asks how designers establish relationships with collectives and populations they seek to help or collaborate with, when those populations are more often than not disadvantaged and culturally Other. Fiss shows how Bhabha's concept of ‘hybridity’, a dynamic and contingent process of representation involving peripheral cultures merging with dominant cultures, is appropriated for the benefit of corporate branding strategies.

Increasingly, advancement of human values forms an integral part of evaluation frameworks assessing the ethical and moral consequences of technology design. In ‘Values and pragmatic action: the challenges of engagement with technical communities in support of value-conscious design’, Noëmi Manders-Huits and Michael Zimmer argue for a pragmatic framework that ensures design of technological systems includes, from the onset, sufficient consideration of ethical and moral consequences of their design. Discouraged by the outcomes of two attempts to engage groups of practitioners in setting up a framework that corresponds to the real-world design context, they identify three key challenges to a successful implementation of a value-conscious design project, and present a scenario for addressing them in the design of web applications that preserve user privacy.

Metaphor and analogy are tools of the visual designer and can be useful to help us reconceive everyday practices and hard-held beliefs. Gavin Sade's ‘Designing well: sustain-able Interaction Design and vegetarianism’ draws on vegetarianism as the analogy for shifting our understanding of discourses in ethics and sustainability as they relate to Interaction Design. Sade critiques models of sustainable practice and unpacks the extent to which they emphasize awareness and consciousnessraising – these being the key design goals necessary for instigating social change. Vegetarianism, Sade holds, is a useful mechanism for reconceptualizing design practice as it relates to the production, consumption and sustainability of energy and energy sources.

The growing significance of grass-roots approaches to Interaction Design fore-grounds participatory design (PD) as a vehicle for recognizing users’ contributions, visibility and responsibilities in the design process. First, the potential of participatory design methods to empower children as practitioners forms the central argument of Oksana Zelenko's ‘Design and ethics in digital mental health promotion’, in which she suggests democratic design methods are a necessary foundation of an ethical framework for the development of strength-based digital resources promoting children's resilience. The chapter explores the implications of introducing a digital humanities methodology into a health-promotion context by drawing parallels between the experiential dimension of both resilience learning and design practice, and investigating the impact this has on the dynamics between designer, participants and the resulting form of the designed object. Zelenko uses a case study of engaging primary school children in designing interaction and interfaces for a set of resilience tools to demonstrate PD's potential to foster resilience learning through enabling agency, dialogue and self-reflection.

In ‘Interaction Design, mass communication and the challenge of distributed expertise’, John Hartley urges for the development of a new ‘user ethic’ to support a distributed model of expertise that encompasses a diversity of knowledge sources comprising the practice of designing interaction. The user ethic, Hartley argues, shifts the dynamic of power between designer and user from an expert-led to a participatory model – a dynamic that is contradicted in the field of mass communication but has shaped the ‘expert-in-charge’ models of practice symptomatic of industrial-age consciousness. Hartley suggests that an expert-led, one-to-many model of communication is irrelevant to DIY culture and user-led innovation, and argues for distributed expertise as the driver of a new paradigm of knowledge growth, one based on increased user agency and a consequent re-envisioning of Interaction Design as productivity design.

Moving from the digital, visual domain to the bricks and mortar of the built form, the next four chapters are underpinned by an awareness of both environmental and social vulnerability, at a time when people live in an increasingly populous and complex world. A common marker and catch-cry of life in the twenty-first century is that now, for the first time in history, more than half the world's population live in cities. Questions of sustainability, population management and environmental degradation are the subject of policy and debates worldwide, with the disciplines of urban planning and architecture playing a central role in the future of our cities. Historical evidence points to the rational ethos underpinning the planning of urban space and the built environment, with critiques suggesting that human interaction in place and space can frequently be overlooked by an overemphasis on the rational. Emma Felton, in ‘Living with strangers: urban space, affect and civility’, draws our attention to the emotional life of urban citizens, and proposes that greater consideration to the affective dimension of public life might help produce more convivial and democratic public spaces. Increasing urbanization across the world is placing greater pressure on cities and citizens. Felton describes the second-tier city of Brisbane, Australia, like many other cities, as undergoing rapid transformation that requires people to live in different ways in denser, more culturally diverse urban environments where tolerance and civility in public spaces requires daily negotiation.

Paul Sanders, Shannon Satherley and Kuniko Shibata parallel the current attention on ethics in urban design with the historical development of modern planning and citizenship rights among disadvantaged populations in modern industrial cities. Key individuals have driven reform movements throughout history and advanced the cause for more equitable and just cities. In ‘Built environment, design and ethics: the social responsibility of educational institutions’, the authors see education grounded in an ethical framework as central to pursuing this agenda in contemporary times, by focusing the curriculum on professional ethics in relation to design practices. Through the example of a design project in which students were engaged in remote communities in Australia, the authors conclude that, with real-life application, it is possible to demonstrate the importance and processes for projects that attend to disadvantaged sectors of the population.

Marci Webster-Mannison brings a pragmatic account from a practitioner's perspective of the inherent tensions in the collaborative process for a built design project that has a strong environmental ethos and is located in a rural campus of an Australian university. In ‘Rethinking practice: architecture, ecology and ethics’, Webster-Mannison draws on her experience as an architect of many years to discuss the limitations of integrating an ecologically sustainable approach into design and construction. The close relationship between architects and the construction and real-estate industry is almost symbiotic and, while it can be mutually beneficial for all participants, it can also present a barrier for the development of environmentally responsible buildings. Drawing on her experience in rural Australia, Webster-Mannison concludes that new understandings about ecocentric architecture are possible.

In ‘Sustainable housing: family experiences with supply chain ethics,’ Wendy Miller draws our attention to the role of human relationships within the built design process, from the less understood perspective of the end-users’ experience of the design and build process. Through in-depth interviews with families involved in the development of homes in an Eco-village, it is evident that the conflicting values of those involved requires careful negotiation in order to achieve the kind of outcomes that can truly be regarded as environmentally sustainable.

As Part III on the built environment testifies, the sustainability of the natural and built environment is the focus of much public attention and debate, coordinated around the central issue of climate change. While governments across the world have reached varying levels of consensus on the call for action, the micro-level details of environmental sustainability present the greatest challenge. In Part IV, the use of environmental resources for manufacturing and production raise yet another set of concerns and discourses that are typically industry specific. Moving from the environment aroun...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Perspectives on design and ethics
• Part II Communication design
• Part III Built environment
• Part IV Fashion
• Part V Epilogue
• Index