Design ethics

first session: intro

I enjoyed this session. It featured interesting discussions on the nature of technology, its ubiquity, its social role, etc. Techno-determinism and the claim that tech is neutral were two claims that we were encouraged to reject as part of the discussion. I never found either very appealing anyway. A lot of what we talked about was not completely new to me, but it was still an interesting discussion. Looking forward to the next session.

second session

Unfortunately, I missed the second session.

thoughts and learnings

The topics discussed in the session I attended brought up many interesting strands of thought for me. One concerns a critique of ethics as a framing. I don’t know to what extent this may have been talked about in the second session, and it is also somewhat tangential to the course, but especially in combination with the first session on critical transfeminist design, it seemed very salient.

Ethics is about evaluating individual choices. Design ethics, on a narrow reading at least, concerns the individual choices of people with some amount of structural power. People who - even though they may not have that much power overall, are given a certain amount of choice as part of broader construct (such as a corporation) which makes that choice a reality. What is more interesting, however, is to think about that (power) structure itself. The issue with extraction and exploitation is not that designers continuously decide to engage in those practices as part of a particular set of choices (design decisions). Rather, it is the fact that the infrastructure (social, cultural, physical, etc) to do so exists at all. The ‘solution’ is not different choices by those in power, or by those who are allowed to have a (relatively samll in the grand scheme of things) choice on a particular product, service, etc. Rather, it is to dismantle those structures themselves.

On the other hand, an individual designer who does find themselves in a certain position should of course take the least harmful course of action. Deciding not to engage in a particular kind of design decision altogether (and e.g. instead find other sources of income) is also potentially an ethical choice. Collective action of the kind required to dissolve status quo structures also ultimately requires individuals to decide to engage in such activity. This can also be conceived of as an ethical choice. In a broad sense this may also be called design ethics (for particular cases of liberatory action).

I also enjoyed the discussions in the lecture itself and would have liked to hear/discuss more. I could write about them here. To give my sleep-deprived body reprieve, however, I will leave it at that.