Chris, Fil, Victor, Ken, David and all,
A short input regarding Design and ethics. For the past 18 months I have been preparing and teaching a course titled "Ethics and Design" for our graduate students at Bezalel Academy.
While maitaining a rather strict reading and data collection program ( well, at least in art&design school standards), for the course to be meaningful, I made a clear decision to try as far as possible to direct the students to dealing with their views, values and personal decision making.
The course is into its 6th week, and I have so far had a few interesting insights from my interaction with the students.
1. For the introduction of "professional Ethics" I invited Prof. Asa Kasher, a professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University and the facilitator/ writer of many professional codes of ethics here in Israel. One of the excellent outcomes of this introductory lecture and long (2.5 hours) discussion that followed, was that it became clear that the act of writing a professional code of ethics, requires that a group of professionals have a clear view of their profession. For the students this means that they must contemplate their personal views regarding the profession we call design before and during their contemplation of design ethics. Not a simple task.
On the other hand, as Prof. Kasher explicitly stated, codes of professional ethics do not need to be written or even fully defined in order to exist, their discussion is already part of their existence.
2. The course is built in such a way that it raises subjects or "teritorries" of ethical tension, where different ethical considerations create friction or even conflict (eg. the concept of safety in products, weapon design, design for special needs, design for sustainablity and more). While preparing the course, I thought that we would mostly deal with the details of phronesis, the actual considerations and paths of ethical decision making. We do, but after a warming up period of 3-4 weeks a big truth came out: many of the students, maybe 30-40% on various levels of conviction, are questioning the basic relevance of asking ethical questions in day to day life of design practice. So, It has become apparent that while maintaining the general framework of the course, I must deal very seriously with this question. What seems to be working quite well is the breaking down of the discussion into 3 categories:
a. red lines, not to be crossed, things to say no to.
b. Cases which are ethicaly sound, requiring no special ethical considerations.
c. The range in between - the cases that will require the designer to act in order to improve the situation, also requiring special acts of data collection, thought, discussion with client and users and many more actions in order to pull (or push :-) the product to a more ethicaly sound place.
Category c is of course the most interesting and intriguing, but it cannot be worked upon without making at least a preliminary venture into a and b.
3. As part of the preparation for the course, and as an ongoing activity, I am collecting various written materials on the subject. Part of the texts were written by people who are active on the list (eg. the articles from Design Philosophy Papers) but there are a lot of other, including some that are not articles written about design ethics per se.
I have put some of these as links or downloads on the web for the benefit of the students, but unfortunately it is not easily accessible (and is hebrew based).
If someone does create a wiki for this subject (sorry, i don"t have the time at the moment to learn how to and do it myself), I will be more than happy to share the sources and resources I have found so far. If you email me at [log in to unmask] I can also pass a word document with the english links and sources.
Not so short sfter all, and I havent said much, hmmmmm, reminds me of a discussion of clear writing on complex issues.
best wishes from Jerusalem, where practical complexity is the name of the game,
Ido.
IDBruno Industrial Design
2 Madregot Hakfar st.
Jerusalem 95741 Israel
Tel. 972-2-6419146 Fax 972-2-6435229
Industrial Design Department
"Bezalel Academy of Art and Design"
Jerusalem 91240 Israel
Tel. 972-2-5893264 Fax 972-2-5818569
email [log in to unmask]
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 11:19:00 -0400
From: "Filippo A. Salustri" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: ...to focus more on the world of design products.
Hi,
I have to agree with Victor. Understanding the designer (design
cognition etc) is very important. But so too is understanding what I
call the consequences of design, or as Victor said "what makes a product
good for the user or for the culture." And I think an important branch
of design research is that which looks at the impact of designs, for the
sake of extracting lessons, heuristics, rules of thumb, or whatever else
that in the end add to the design body of knowledge.
Cheers.
Fil
Victor Margolin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear colleagues:
> I have been following the thread on design making and design thinking as well as the reflections on design research and will jump in briefly at the risk of getting clobbered or drowned. I have just finished reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and was impressed by Aristotle's emphasis on the relation of theory and action. To be honest, in the development of design research over the past years, I have not seen enough discussion of action; that is, what could or should designers be doing. We have a need for many new kinds of products as well as a need to improve the quality of those we have. Many products are moving into the market that have social consequences which are not being discussed by anybody. I introduced a related idea some time ago but it disappeared as quickly as a pint of lager. Why don't researchers want to focus more on the world of design products, what it is and what it could be. We talk about cognition, emotion, form etc. but not enough about what make!
s a
product good for the user or for the culture. I should think these questions would be at the forefront of research but the discussions of design cognition and design thinking are so thick that it appears difficult to move out of them into a new space.
> Victor Margolin
> Professor Emeritus
> University of Illinois, Chicago
--
Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Ryerson University
350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON, M5B 2K3, Canada
Tel: 416/979-5000 ext 7749
Fax: 416/979-5265
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 11:25:31 -0400
From: "Filippo A. Salustri" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Wisdom, phronesis, and ethics in design
Hi,
I keyed off Ken's phrase "to bring forward some of the good work...."
I would suggest that via a wiki, we could build a list of such articles,
possibly linking them to downloads where possible. One might even then
have a running commentary on the various articles.
Chris Rust's 'Design Inquiry' wiki might be a suitable place. (CAVEAT:
I believe Chris is on holiday now, and I do not speak for him wrt
actually implementing this.)
Cheers.
Fil
Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> There are nevertheless people doing good work on this, writing beautiful prose, and putting good ideas forward. Ezio Manzini is a case in point. Others approach the ethics of designed artifacts and their socio-cultural effects in a playful, provocative way. Anthony Dunne's work comes to mind. There's been good work on this in the close-by field of technology studies -- Patrice Flichy's work, for example, and his useful point that every technology is a social technology.
>
> One way to advance this conversation would be to bring forward some of the good work that has been done. Just a thought.
>
> Warm wishes,
>
> Ken
>
>
> Victor Margolin wrote:
>
> "Why don't researchers want to focus more on the world of design products, what it is and what it could be. We talk about cognition, emotion, form etc. but not enough about what makes a product good for the user or for the culture."
--
Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Ryerson University
350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON, M5B 2K3, Canada
Tel: 416/979-5000 ext 7749
Fax: 416/979-5265
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/
------------------------------
End of PHD-DESIGN Digest - 3 Apr 2007 to 4 Apr 2007 (#2007-73)
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