This summary provides an outline of my Masters thesis entitled, ‘Ethical tensions in design practice’, submitted for completion of Masters in Design Futures at RMIT, June 2018.
The following provides a high-level overview as my research in this area is ongoing. Some aspects of the thesis have been edited out on this basis. For more information, please contact me at lucy@eyelovelucy.com.
Research objective
I chose to discover the role of ethics within design practice because I believe design needs to be accountable. Designers need to lead ethically and own the responsibility that comes with the job.
Ethics embody what it means to be human, and design channels that thinking into the creation of the objects and services which impact the ethics of everyday life: how we understand and relate to ourselves and each other, and therefore our reality. It becomes difficult to engage a discussion on design ethics without insight into the designer as the key medium through which ethics are imbued into designed things.
To gain an understanding of the role of ethics in design, a focus on the designer as the central actor is required as the reference point from which all other parts of the ethics of design emanates.
Research question
‘How does the designer build their ethical practice?’
What I am investigating and why
The ethics of the designer and the way they manifest in practice is unknowable to anyone but the individual practitioner. This was made explicit through the extreme disparity in research participant data relating to individual practice contexts, sectors within industry, personal beliefs and cultural backgrounds and the role of ethical interplay therein. I therefore hypothesise that creating a process for the designer to help self-identify their ethics is the first step enabling them to enact ethics in their practice.
To that end, speculative design has been leveraged to pose questions which are reflective of the world as we know it today, and another more speculative one. Through these two worlds, the designer is forced to consider what might happen in a variety of situations without ethical action. The rationale of this approach is designed to help expose the core values of the designer by using speculation as a means to initiate and then embed ethics in their everyday life.
What I have concluded
It is not possible to advance design ethics through a unified approach.
Myriad factors demonstrate the need for an alternate response to commonplace solutions to support the diversity and tangential nature of the design profession. The key vehicle to test this hypothesis took the form of prototype to connect the research to practice using human-centred design tools.
[The Project report and outcomes have been left out.]
Reflection
Speculative design complements my emergent and evolving views and has allowed me to rekindle my love for practice by taking me beyond self-defined walls. Speculative design coerced me to connect multiple layers of research to my personal journey by pushing me to explore design creatively away from commercial constraints and typical processes and artefacts.
Speculative design is just one way that designers can begin to understand the conditions they create, and the conditions they affect. Dissecting contexts and moving away from the probable toward the possible, plausible and preferable can provoke new methodologies, new processes and new design discourse by breaking things down and building up new ways to enact design.
The true nature of design ethics is misunderstood with commonplace commercial responses seeking a single answer to what is an extremely complex and personal set of experiences and values. The constant string of suggestion to create an ethical toolkit demonstrates this, and will happen regardless of the contribution of this Project. The general nature of design as solutionist and reductive will result in this outcome by a designer at best, which is not necessarily negative, just an inaccurate dissemination that reflects the problems this Project aims to unpack.
This Project takes current research in existing discourses and through new insights, gives them form through prototype, thereby connecting disparate academic concepts into real-life assessment. The prototype allows the thinking to enter a tangible space to undergo continuous improvement and investigation, revealing the process of design and my own experiment to connect my academic learnings with my professional practice.
Advocating for design as empirical, experimental, emergent and evolving enables designers to strive toward the future. These perspectives scream possibility and potential for design practice to be many, many things beyond the structures set forth by commercial headquarters. Still in infancy, design has a long road ahead, where investment in discovery and questioning the status quo is part of moving through adolescence. Conformity and circumspection are the enemies of new thinking, and anathema to these perspectives.
My cognisant state has occurred for two primary reasons:
- Speculative design has shown me that design can be empirical, experimental, emerging and evolving. It is our imperative to explore, push and shape the practice to adequately respond to problems, but, more importantly to find the right ways to respond by seeing things differently.
- That design is not a commodity; it is a process that serves multiple ends through multiple means if you’re courageous enough to let go of what you know to be true. Design can test you and what you know, if you allow the exploration to take you there.
These have become my design ethics. These two personal discoveries I have made are the response to the ethical discoveries I have made in this Project by letting go of what I thought to be true, and going on a journey without a destination.
I will continue to publish findings as the research progresses. For more information, please contact me at lucy@eyelovelucy.com
References
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