Design Ethics

So, the job offer I had been super excited about was cancelled. Lately this past month I’ve just been doing a few client projects here and there and taking more class while praying for a vaccine and waiting for this storm to pass.

It's been a time of reflection, I guess. I’ve been reading these books about what it means to be a designer and what it means to do right by other people, as a designer and it's got me thinking again about a lot of things and what kind of designer I want to be.

My first semester at CMU, I took an engineering-type course about manufacturing and sustainability. My professor told me that about 80% of the decisions that make products less sustainable actually happen in the design stage. It blew my mind. Up until then, I always imagined us as the scrappy creatives — how could we do wrong? It was jarring to realize that many problems in the world are messes that we designers have created. We’re designers, lol. We’re supposed to save the world! We were the chosen ones! We were supposed to bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness, lol.

Why didn’t we learn this in school? The more I think about it, the more it's been bothering me. My instructors always told us we are more than just a pair of hands, yet we didn’t really spend very much time talking about the concept of Design Ethics. And its so important lol. An army of bad designers in the world can seriously fuck shit up. And we already kind of did fuck shit up. Doctors have to take a hippocratic oath upon leaving med school, maybe designers should do something similar too haha [re: Mike Monteiro]

I mean, I’ve met some remarkable classmates and later, colleagues, who worked so hard to be that next level kind of designer, but unfortunately at the time it wasn’t me. I do wish I could’ve encountered Victor Papanek earlier in my life though. I read Design for the Real World years ago and it blew my mind! As he said near the end of the book, “the problem with design schools...is that they teach too much design”. Thirty years later, it still rings so true. Anyway, I wanted to share some of the books I’ve been reading lately in this post.