Do Designers Need Ethics?

I do think there should be more debate around ethical considerations and how we can support designers in really working to their best ability with other people in this collaborative way.

Today I wanted to talk a little bit about something were doing a lot of work on at the moment, which is really about the ethics in collaborative design – which seem to have been lost along the way.

As designers we are all working on projects that are very different to how we have been trained. We weren’t really trained in collaborative design we just sort of found our way along the lines All the work we are doing that is very collaborative brings up a lot of ethical issues, which I don’t think the design industry or designers really make huge considerations for.

For example let's take – and I’m going to use the Design Council's terminology because we're here today – the co-discovery phase, the research phase. We're talking about working with people at the heart of the project to really get to the bottom of the issues. Lots of ethical issues arise from this stage. Such as: are designers actually equipped to deal with the sort of information they might uncover? A lot of the time we are working in projects to do with worklessness or health or, for example, we’ve been doing a project on teenage pregnancy. Trying to get to the heart of these issues uncovers a lot of social issues – do designers do know what to do if they do uncover some of these issues?

I know somebody recently, another designer, who had to go to the police because of the information he was told about during an interview. His background was in social care so he knew he had to do this. How many designers would know the right steps to go through?

In addition, are the people getting involved with this research fully aware of what’s going on and how might it affect them in the long term?

On the other side, there are ethics around the designers doing the work. Are they protected? Some of the time we go out and are going ehtnographic interviews or in-depth interviews in people's houses because you want to see the position some people are in. There’s nothing to tell you if you should go in pairs or should give your address to a colleague or to tell them where you're going. Also if you’re feeling uncomfortable in a setting how do you or your employer get out, which can be very difficult if your new in a job or just starting out. It made me think that in other profession you would get a lot of training in how to deal with these situations.

I’m not advocating that we need an ethical board for design, but I do think there should be more debate around ethical considerations and how we can support designers in really working to their best ability with other people in this collaborative way.

Founding partner of Uscreates, a creative agency that uses collaborative approaches to change public behaviours for a Speakersbetter society. Mary Rose studied design at Goldsmiths College and produced work that won her the title of ‘New Designer of the Year’ in 2005. Before founding Uscreates, Mary Rose worked as a free-lance designer and design consultant working with clients such as BT, Faculty of Education at Cambridge University and Channel 4. Alongside her work, she set up a design collective Us&Us, with Zoe Stanton and designers &Made, working on interactive installations. She is currently writing up her PhD thesis on the role of the designer in creating sustainable communities.