Design Ethics Reflection¶
It was a meaningful series of classes for me to think about my project and how I want to be a professional as a designer. I always was feeling this dilemma as a designer to have what kind of ethics I should follow. Though through these classes I think I am more comfortable with what I honestly feel. I learned three different ethical ways of thinking in this class. It is how technology can be used in design, how designers should act as a person who has a will and ego, and how professional designers should design. I will follow my process of getting that ethics in myself as writing down in words. I have actually been thinking about how I should have my ethics as a designer during my undergraduate project. That time, I was researching urban food waste in Tokyo, Japan which was mainly produced and wasted in combini stores. While researching, I have reached out to so many stakeholders including some people who can be considered as socially vulnerable such as homeless and welfare recipients. I always considered where this project leads out to, because I and my design can be egoistic to someone that I had encountered during the research. I first had a desire to design something like a product or the system that can be a solution for food waste in city, but I did not want to take over the current ones because it has a possibility to unnecesarily hurt someone. Just because I didn’t want to be egoistic to change something by my design, I took a way not to design everything but showing how people can participate in the design. And it was successful from an ethical perspective. Though, there was always a conflict inside me because I also wanted to design something despite what. I think it is a limitation to the ethics in design. Now at MDEF, I continue to work on the food waste topics with compost as a dynamism of my design proposition. I wanted to make a toolkit that can make everyone engage in compost making. For this, I also had to have this ethical question whether or not to use technology. I think technology like sensors can help people to understand what they are doing, though it can also be a barrier for them to truly understand or embody what they are doing. It is also true that they can use low-tech things to detect what they need to know. So I chose not to make a technological solution for compost making, but as experimental, I used sensors to learn this usage as a designer. It is useful to know but once you understand the theory of what you’re doing, for this time how compost works, you don’t need to use any fancy tools.I think so many things don’t require technology. But at the same time it is also true that everything is such a technology, compared to old indegenous knowledge and skills. I think now is the time to carefully think about why the world and life has adjusted to this kind of place full of technology. It is modernization,capitalism,globalization, and so on. Understanding that, then I can choose the ethical way to deal with things as a designer. Also for my MDEF project for doing compost, I had faced this question of how I should design or what I should design for a community. I was also working with local people who are working for a community garden in Poblenou, and it was really hard to communicate with them. They are doing this community garden as a form of democratic participation. They always have to consent among them by making everyone agree on one single decision. When I as a student ,who wanted to collaborate with them, went there to talk about setting up a new compost bin, they started to talk about where ro place the compost bin and it took more than two weeks for them to decide. At that time, I thought I needed to design a workshop or something to let them think and do the compost together so it would not take that long. Though my project mate said that he wanted to be patient with them so he let them do what they do. And the result was that, taking so much time on just deciding a place. I totally disagree with this design decision that he has made of not designing, I think as a designer we should have chosen the best way to lead them by designing in the right direction. And I think that is an important role for a designer to act as design ethics instead of being patient nor controlling people. Designers should be equal to the people. For the next step of my project, I will design a compost platform that can be open for anyone, and people can use their own creativity to output as their own cases. It is not controlling nor changing someone’s or something’s life. I, as a designer, show what is ethical to the world through what I do, instead of designing artifacts but a network that triggers people. Above that is a professionalism that I can say about a designer. I think that it is hard to act as an ethically professional designer by themself. It is always needed to have some reflection from a third person point of view. I guess that designers should not always forget that our decision can change someone’s or something’s life because the profession we have is super dependent on people. And that changing someone’s life can be both a good or bad experience for both us designers and the people who receive. Though that does not mean that we always should just listen to the people, because I think that professional value as a designer is what kind of assessment that you can show through your design and how it can have an impact on people, species, earth, and so on. Between those realities and designer ethics, integrating both sides of them, we can design something that is a professional design.