Design is Ethics

Are You A Good Designer?
by Kate Andrews

Throughout every stage of my creative training, I have echoed the belief that design is “quintessentially an ethical process” (Devon and Poel 2002). I strongly believe that Communication Design has a positive and negative ability to affect social change, but recognize that its influential power should be treated with respect and careful consideration, of its use, from all its designers.

“Ethics is not an appendage to design but an integral part of it, and we advocate using the moral imagination to draw out the ethical implications of a design. We will stress and develop the social ethics paradigm, because design is an iterative social process for making technical and social decisions that may itself be designed at each stage with different people at the table, different information flows, different normative relationships, different authority structures, and different social and environmental considerations in mind. […] One might make the distinction that professional ethics is concerned with the `good’ […] (Devon and Poel 2002).”