Is Ethical Design a Thing?

After attending August de los Reyes: The Power of Inclusive Design, it brings back these two words to me: Ethical Design. Although, universal and inclusive design do address many aspects in design work, where ethical design stands. August pointed out design should be ethical during the Q&A. I honestly was not really satisfy with the answer. If design is ethical, then there won’t be Climate Change, Global Warming, e-waste etc.

To begin with, Scott points out that “Businesses often take advantage of what we called externalities, which means things that affect someone without them choosing it. In 1924, the head of General Motors realized that the car market was saturated: everyone wanted a car had on – an interview by Melissa Block on “GM’s Role in American Life”. It was a change of event for the rest of us because there will always be a new version every year for an upgrade. It sounds familiar, right?

Rey Ramsey, former chair of Habitat for Humanity explains that despite the history, “people are lulled to sleep thinking that certain things happened by default, rather than by design”, quoted by Scott in “How Design Makes the World. In Prototyping Social Interaction article in Design Issues 24 elaborated on what was it that companies were prototyping. The answer was not products or service, but rather human behavior. For example, the Facebook Effect has programmed society to post, like and share nonstop on the platform. Yet, we are OK with that because we are being programmed to do so at the unconscious level.

So is ethical design a thing? the answer is yes and in fact it is a new methodology that designers and corporation needs take into account. It embraces human value as defined by Maheen Sohail. It is matter because we are living in the information age, where things get spread rapidly with no boundary. New phones, new cars, new clothes and so forth are being produced every seconds, despite the slow process of reuse and recycle mechanism. Is it really necessary to multi sizes of smartphones to use make a call, text and check email? This is where ethical design might come into the picture.