In my most recent article, ‘Design ethics for designers who give a toss’, I published a Speculative Design Ethics Canvas to help designers locate their ethics and put them into action.
Here’s a bit more detail…
My 2018 thesis found that the out-of-the-box ethics tools we use in our practices aren’t effective; that ethics isn’t one-size-fits-all. This and other research insights highlighted that design practitioners approach their practices from different angles due to their different values and core beliefs.
These discoveries initiated further exploration to uncover ways I could validate and push what I’d found into practical and verifiable territories.
And that’s when Speculative Design landed in my lap. Donald Schon’s, ‘The Reflective Practitioner’ had already given me the knowledge that designers need to reflect to be effective, which my research also supported. But I discovered during my research synthesis that fusing one’s personal and professional beliefs through reflection could provide the pathway to support my initial findings that design ethics starts with the designer.
So, Speculative Design became the means with which I could further and validate my initial findings.
To recap… What are ethics?
Being human involves making choices. And whenever we make a choice, it means that we could have made a different one. Out of all the choices we can make at any given time, which choice should we make?
This is what ethics are. Ethics help us work out how to act.
What do we mean by design ethics, then?
Design ethics is an extension of our personal ethics as applied to our work.
Like ethics, design ethics are the choices we make daily, just at work. But unlike our personal ethics, design ethics impact our teams, clients, customers and society.
But the way to design ethically doesn’t start with them or what they believe is ethical rather it starts with us as designers. Before designers can identify, share and scale ethics at work, they need to firstly seek out where they stand ethically.
Understanding where our moral compass lies is the first step toward identifying where we might be going wrong at work.
What is Speculative Design?
Speculative design is a theory which uses scenarios to travel ahead in time and paint a picture of what could happen without taking new directions in the present. Speculative design began its life in the art world about a decade ago, created to theorise the practices that artists were exploring to tell their story of an extreme alternate reality. Through physical, sculptural pieces, the artworks took viewers to another dimension by exploring ideas which challenge the questionable aspects of our existence.
How the Speculative Design Ethics Canvas works
The Speculative Design Ethics Canvas evolved from a lot of interest I received during my research from designers who wanted some tools to help them situate and contextualise their ethical compass. It starts with the problem or dilemma the designer is facing and introduces some considerations to break it down and work out what to do about it. There is often more to a problem, or situation, than meets the eye and my research shows that the opportunity to look at a problem from multiple angles can help make it more solvable and manageable.
It’s only YOU who knows if a situation or concept feels icky — there’s no ethics police to help designers decide. The Speculative Design Ethics Canvas is a tool to identify a shitty, potentially unethical dilemma you might be experiencing, and take it from an icky feeling to something you can work with and respond to.
Take 15 minutes and work out how and why something might be bothering you under your ethical surface.
Please download it and send me an email with your thoughts. Let’s build out the next iteration!
Visit designethics.com.au and try the Speculative Design Ethics Canvas.
Lucy West is a Melbourne-based design practitioner with over ten years’ experience working across the design spectrum. She gets her kicks exploring new forms of design practice with a focus on ethics, leadership and strategy toward creating sustainable futures.
