Ethics in Design
- It is about why we design. Design itself is ethics. It is all about what is the right thing to do, and not just technically.
- Seamus Heaney in his Nobel speech “Crediting Poetry” asks the same question about poetry. He’s seeking a principle to justify being a poet. Poetry is pleasurable, but it isn’t enough. It needs to be grounded in principle.
Principles are what organize. They ground us in organizations and in the world. Principles are values, which are facts, which equal status in the world. It is a fact that people value things. - Caroline Whitbeck in Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research argues that ethics is traditionally regarded as judging something that has already been done. But the bigger challenge and what ethics should be is about the way to act.
- “Designers need to be both technically right and compellingly wise. Wisdom is about evaluating and choosing between competing principles. And to be wise is to be aware. And awareness is the passage to action.”
- Design has emerged as one of the world’s most powerful forces. It has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility, where all economies and ecologies are becoming global, relational, and interconnected.
