Design Ethics

Design ethics: Reflecting on the ethical
dimensions of technology, sustainability, and

responsibility in the Anthropocene
Jeffrey K. H. Chan, Department of Architecture, School of Design and
Environment, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive
117566, Singapore
Ethics is integral to design in many ways. But design ethics has remained under-
developed despite an increasing relevance in the Anthropocene, when many novel
ethical issues and problems are anticipated to emerge from man-made artifacts
and systems. The aim of this article is to revitalize the discourse of design ethics.
Firstly, I define ‘design ethics’ in relation to the distinction between ‘ethics’ and
‘morality’. Secondly and through the perspective of ethics, I draw out new issues
and questions by examining three commonly encountered categories in design,
namely, ‘technology’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘responsibility’. Finally, I conclude by
suggesting that it is important not to relinquish the formative potential of ethics
for design despite its complexity, or its ostensible intractability.
Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: design theory, philosophy of design, technology, design activity,

ethics
1 Introduction
Design is quintessentially an ethical process (Devon & Van de Poel, 2004, p.
461). Which problems designers choose to solvedand whydand who to
include or exclude as beneficiaries of this design not only presume choice pref-
erences but also more fundamentally, value positions on the good or worth-
while life. And in radical design with few guidelines in place, designers also
confront value conflicts: which value to prioritize and how to make an accept-
able trade-off between two equally valued goodsdfor instance between safety
and sustainabilitydare intrinsically, ethical questions (Van Gorp & Van de
Poel, 2008). Despite this recognition that ethics is integral to design in many
ways, design ethics remains ‘massively underdeveloped and even in its crudest
forms remains marginal within design education’ (Fry, 2009, p. 3). This knowl-
edge gap in design ethics has become especially urgent in the Anthropocene
because the world we inhabit is, increasingly, also the world we have made
Corresponding author: (Aicher, 1994; Purdy, 2015, p. 3).
Jeffrey K H Chan
akickhj@nus.edu.sg
www.elsevier.com/locate/destud
0142-694X Design Studies -- (2017) --e--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2017.09.005 1
Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Chan, J. K. H., Design ethics: Reflecting on the ethical dimensions of technology, sus-
tainability, and responsibility in the Anthropocene, Design Studies (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2017.09.005
In view of this knowledge gap, it is paramount to revitalize the discourse of
design ethics in some form. This article represents such an attempt but it is
hardly the lone voice in the wilderness on design ethics. Scholarly
research on this subject area within design studiesduneven or sporadic that
may bedspans at least across three decades (see, d’Anjou, 2010; Devon &
Van de Poel, 2004; Findeli, 1994; Flusser, 1999; Fry, 2004; Manzini, 2006;
Mitcham, 1995; Naoe, 2008; Parsons, 2016; Steen, 2015; Tonkinwise, 2004;
Van Amerongen, 2004; Van de Poel, 2015; Van Gorp & Van de Poel, 2008;
Zelenko & Felton, 2012). But relative to the extent, impacts and ramifications
of design in the Anthropocene, and in spite of this diverse scholarship, design
ethics has yet to gain steady traction in either practice or academiadresulting
in little prospect for the development of a body of ethical knowledge commen-
surate with the moral challenges posed by design today.
2 The significance of ethics in the Anthropocene

The overall aim of this article is to revitalize a discussion on design ethics in the
context of the Anthropocene; and through this discussion, to draw out new is-
sues and perspectives that ethics can offer design. Specifically, this article aims
to contribute in the following two ways. Firstly, this article will begin by
defining ‘design ethics’. While the concept ‘design ethics’ is conventionally
taken to represent the systematic study of ethical concepts or principles in
design, what it actually means, and why it should be the preferred term of
reference, have remained largely unclear. Secondly and using the conceptual
vehicles of ‘technology’, ‘sustainability’, and ‘responsibility’dthree commonly
encountered concepts in design studiesdthis article will further show how
ethics can prompt new avenues to understand design, which in turn may catal-
yse new research possibilities or design innovations.
Importantly, this article argues that design ethics has become paramount in
the Anthropocene. Admittedly, the Anthropocene is not yet officially estab-
lished; it has also gained a reputation for being a ‘trending’, academic buzz-
word (Stromberg, 2013). Yet the use of the Anthropocene here is deliberate
for two key reasons. Firstly and despite its ‘unofficial’ status, the Anthropo-
cene has become something of an empirical consensus. Presently, the Anthro-
pocene has developed into a nascent but growing discourse observable in many
conferences, published articles and even books. Within this nascent discourse,
it has been recognized that the state of the Earth system now no longer pro-
vides the same kind of functional stability assumed in the Holocene (that is,
the geological epoch before the newly proposed Anthropocene), and this
emerging turn towards greater uncertainty and volatility implicates the very
notion of conventional ethics, which tended to presume environmental stabil-
ity (Schmidt, Brown, & Orr, 2016, p. 193). For instance, the ability presumed
by consequentialist ethics to reliably estimate consequences or predict the full
ramifications of actions in non-linear systems has become very limited in the
2 Design Studies Vol -- No. -- Month 2017
Anthropocene (Schmidt et al., 2016, p. 193). What this portends for the ethics
of designing large-scale environmental systems, or artifacts that aggregate into
large-scale impacts, is perplexing. Secondly, the Anthropocene, as the age of
humans implies, that many ethical issues and problems are likely to be either
directly man-made, or are created by the indirect and unintended couplings be-
tween artificial systems. In this way, the ‘Anthropocene Condition’ (Purdy,
2015, p. 4) has long been anticipated by designers, ahead of everyone else,
as the condition of the ‘world as design’ (Aicher, 1994).
3 Defining design ethics: distinction and content

What then is ‘design ethics’? To answer this question, one may begin by distin-
guishing between ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’. While the former suggests the
broader philosophical question concerned with how one should live, or what
a good human life consists in, the latter suggests the narrower adherence to
a set of rules or social norms that constrain public behaviour (Parsons,
2016). On one hand, design clearlydthough not always explicitlydhas to pre-
sume some fundamental ideals of what is a good or worthwhile life. On the
other hand to make design feasible, these ideals are usually tempered within
the parameters of some acceptable rules or obligatory norms. And so design
ethics ought to comprise of both the broader notion of ethics, and the nar-
rower notion of obligations (Parsons, 2016, p. 129). However, Parsons neither
explains why this distinction may be especially warranted in design, nor says to
what extent the phrase ‘design ethics’ is more appropriate than ‘design moral-
ity’. The subsequent discussion will build on, and then extend, Parsons’s work
on design ethics.
In natural language today, ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ (or ‘morals’) are often used
synonymously or interchangeably. However, this form of usage precludes the
significant possibility that ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ can conflict. Bauman (1993:
p. 4) once defined the great issues of ethics, among many others, as issues of
human rights, social justice, or the balance between altruism and self-
interest. All these issues attempt to discover, and then specify, the relations
we ought to have with other people in their moral status as human beings
(Margalit, 2009: p. 2e3). To this list, I will only add a few more that appears
to pertain directly to design: ecological restoration (Katz, 2012); weapons of
mass destruction (Jaspers, 1961), or weapons design (Cummings, 2006); and
designer babies and enhancement drugs (Sandel, 2007).
In all these issues and more, compliance to rules or social norms can often
imply a conflict with certain ethical ideals. Or in other words, morality, con-
cerned with obligatory action, can often conflict with ethics, which is con-
cerned with a good or a worthwhile life (Taylor, 2011, p. 4)dand vice versa.
On this, Murdoch (2014: p. 87) provides an example of a scientist who thought
that he should give up a certain branch of study after realizing that his
The ethical dimensions of design in the Anthropocene 3
discoveries would be used wickedly. While social norms appear to support the
moral neutrality of his inquiry, and while the institutions he served might have
even encouraged it, this scientist knew better. In light of the good or worth-
while life that would likely be lost had he chosen to continue with his inquiry,
this scientist relented. Importantly, this scientist did not need to know the full
and complete specification of his ethics, or his notions of the ‘good life’, in or-
der to make this decision; he may only need to know what it would take to
guarantee the continuation of science, or his practice, in the next generation
(see Churchman, 1971, p. 274). Indeed, the fact that certain norms have passed
the test of time, or are strongly embedded in a social context does not, by
default, justify that norm (Van Amerongen, 2004). Ethics, however it may
be defined today in plural societies, also play an important moderating role
for specifying human actions through this productive conflict.
But conversely, there is no guarantee that ethicsdor the ideal goals and no-
tions of the good lifedcan remain unchanged before fluid social norms and
contexts (Bauman, 1993). The notions of the good life at the cusp of the Indus-
trial Revolution might have been material abundance, or the full and complete
subjugation of the Earth. But today, and despite pluralism, the perpetuation of
the human species for as long as possible within a livable environment has
become one common and paramount goal of ethics (see Jonas, 1984). This
said, the nature of ethicsdmostly predicated on the ends of human well-
being and flourishingdneither changes as frequently, nor as rapidly, relative
to morality, which is arguably more closely tied to the vicissitudes of changing
social norms and contexts.
And because of this distinctiondand the conflicts that this distinction can
bring aboutdwhat ethics as a lens can do for design has become vastly wider
and richer. At one level, this distinction enables a form of applied ethics: to
determine the virtuousness, or responsibility, of a designer’s compliance to
some accepted social norms and standards, even when there exist strong incen-
tives to do otherwise (Barnard, 1968, p. 269). In the same way but conversely,
this distinction can also inform judgment under uncertainty: to find out just how
justifiable it is for the designer to comply to existing norms and standards, even
when this compliance would likely result in harmful consequences (Naoe,
2008). If the former is at least important for evaluating the responsibility of
designersdespecially in the context of design teams or organizationsdthen
the latter is critical for assessing design accountability in conditions of uncer-
tainty. And at another level, this distinction can reveal moral dilemmas key to
catalysing the moral imagination of designers, which in turn may likely
prompt design innovations. The spork is hardly the product of a moral
dilemma but that of bisociation (Koestler, 1964); but it is nonetheless, an arti-
factual compromise between a spoon and a fork. Similarly, the impasse of
moral dilemmas can often impel designers to invent anew in the form of
new options, or ‘creative compromises’ (Van de Poel, 2015, p. 94), that can
integrate once intractable differences. In sum, this distinction, which is reflec-
tive of a ‘wider focus’ (Taylor, 2011, p. 4) underway in moral philosophy, then
permits a profound richness and complexity on moral matters otherwise
precluded when ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ are either conflated or used
interchangeably.
If this distinction is warranted, why then should ‘design ethics’ be preferred

over ‘design morality’? Clearly, conventions matter. In no placedas far as
the author knowsdis the phrase ‘design morality’ used to refer to moral mat-
ters in design. Beyond conventionalism however, there are two further reasons
for why ‘design ethics’ ought to be preferred. Firstly as discussed, the concept
of ‘ethics’ suggests the broader perspective on moral matters. This understand-
ing is also compatible to the way ‘ethics’ is referred to as the branch of philo-
sophical knowledge on moral ideas and principles. Secondly, ethics involves
more than what is obligatory; it also involves defining, knowing and then at-
taining what is good or ideal (Taylor, 2011, p. 9): ethics is oriented to both pro-
jective thinking and practical action. ‘Design’, which in one canonical
definition has been defined as a course of actions aimed at changing existing
situations into preferred ones (Simon, 1996, p. 111), then makes for a more
consistent conjugation with ‘ethics’. Therefore on these grounds of conven-
tionalism, compatibilism, and also consistency, ‘design ethics’ ought to be
preferred over ‘design morality’.
Now that design ethics has been defined, and also established as the term of
reference, what does it entail? Referring to Parsons (2016) again, design ethics
can be used to refer to at least the following three categories of relation be-
tween design and ethics: (i) the ethical issues or conflicts that can emerge
when designers handle rules and norms as they apply to the objects they are
designing; (ii) questioning the very choice of what designers are creating or
designing; (iii) and considering how design can come to modify, or change,
our existing notions of ethics.
While the first category has been covered earlier in this discussion, it is the sec-
ond and third categories that are less explored. This article will therefore un-
pack these two relations through the categories of ‘technology’, ‘sustainability’
and ‘responsibility’ commonly encountered in design studies. Importantly, my
analysis will demonstrate how ethics, through the realities presented by each of
these categories, can bring about new perspectives that simultaneously extend,
yet confound, our present understanding of design.
4 Technology: from instrumentality to the morality of

things?
According to Heidegger (2004), modern technology has transformed the moral
relations between person to person, and of persons to the world. Instead of
treating persons or certain entities in the world as ends in themselves, they have
been transformed into means by modern technology. In other words, modern
technology, among other attributes, has precipitated the nihilism of absolute
instrumentality.
But this nihilism never quite materialized. What emerged instead was the
triumphalism of means, where means became their own absolute ends. For
instance, where is that fastest car in the world going? What are the reasons
for building the tallest building? And why is a watch that answers our phone
calls even necessary? Rittel calls this phenomenon the ‘curse of feasibility’
(Protzen & Harris, 2010, p. 223): ‘I do because I can’. In parallel, C.W.
Churchman suggests that the most startling feature of the 20th century is
that mankind has developed such elaborate ways of doing things while simul-
taneously developed no way of justifying any one of them (Churchman, 1961,
p. 1). Indeed, the more pronounced and articulated technology becomes, the
more humanity is exposed to the unanticipated side effects and risks of har-
nessing technology (Wolin, 2001). And attempting to address these side effects
and risks with more technology only perpetuates the cycle of unanticipated
and undesirable side and after effects (Beck, 1992; Findeli, 1994). The power,
as the willingness, to harness technology has far exceeded the capacity to know
its actual consequences, and this in turn creates a class of new problems that
behoves a new ethic, hence the ethic of responsibility (Jonas, 1984).
Even so, the arguments mounted by Jonas and others on technology and ethics
are often ‘defined in reference to large choices’ (Manzini, 1992, p. 5). Manzini
(1992) suggests there are few hints in these arguments for constructing a sys-
tem of valuesdan ethics of designdfor everyday design decisions. To the
extent that Manzini is correct, little insight has been transferred from the
macro-ethics of technology to everyday design practices. And to the extent
Jonas’s arguments remain valid, the triumphalism of means persists. Often,
there is little substantive justification for why many technologies and products
exist except for reasons of frivolity and increasingly, because of reckless greed.
Like in Jonas’s milieu, the future of this present age remains at riskdand in
part due to design (Fry, 2009). Presently, design facilitates the ceaseless cycles
of new product development, which in turn legitimize design. In this context,
design and design ethics can be self-critical but they cannot do so without also
being threatened by self-negation. Therefore, there is little design ethics can do
in this paradigm of technology beyond tinkling warning bells (see Beck &
Willms, 2004, p. 204).
Is there then another paradigm to develop design ethics in relation to technol-

ogy? A patchy discourse on the morality and moral mediation of artefacts has
emerged (Chan, 2015; Flusser, 1999; Latour, 1992; Parsons, 2016; Tonkinwise,
2004; Verbeek, 2008, 2011). Unlike the instrumentalist paradigm of technol-
ogy where technology is perceived to be external to moral choices, this
discourse posits technology as a mediator in moral choices. In the instrumen-
talist paradigm, technology is either used or being abused by the moral agent;
technology is a value-neutral entity and ethical attributes only reside within the
agent. By extension, an ethics of technology associated to this instrumentalist
paradigm could only ask if the ends justify the means, or whether certain con-
sequences are justifiable, and by what ethics, and to what extent is the agent
virtuous or not in the use of technology. In other words, this paradigm would
only admit to the view that moral agency begins and ends with the human,
moral agent.
But in the mediation paradigm, it is no longer clear if moral agency resides in

the human agent alone. In this paradigm, moral agency is seen as the outcome
of an assemblage made up of human agents and technology. And while the
exact extent of technological mediation remains unclear, the example of the
obstetrical ultrasound technology goes to show how the moral assemblage
comprising of doctors, patient, foetus and technology has been altered because
of ultrasound (Verbeek, 2008). In this case, the visualization offered by obstet-
rical ultrasound has opened up new moral choices that were previously unavai-
lable. And even if one demurs on this view, it is harder to deny that the design
choices made in technological designdfor example choosing to represent the
foetus at a certain size on the viewing monitor to accentuate its personhood
(Verbeek, 2011)dcan directly implicate ethical choices by modifying our
moral expectation and imagination.
Admittedly, there is still little consensus on the mediation paradigm (see Chan,
2015). On this, Parsons (2016: p. 145) suggests that the mediation paradigm
makes it harder to focus ethical analysis on where it is ultimately needed,
which is on human decisions and actionsdnot on artifacts or a kind of moral-
ity predicated on materialism. Even so, the mediation paradigm of technology
appears at least useful to design in two different ways (Verbeek, 2008). Firstly,
this paradigm is able to develop a moral assessment of technologies in terms of
their likely mediating roles. For example, to what extent are choice architec-
tures, designed to ‘nudge’ users in certain ways over others (Thaler &
Sunstein, 2008), justifiable? And secondly because of this paradigm, ethics is
able to shift from the domain of language to the medium of materiality. In
the context of design ethics, I suggest that it is the latter suggestion that ought
to invite further reflection. To the extent that ethics can be materialized, ethics
might have to be designed. A recent thought experiment carried out at the Uni-
versity of Alabama (Birmingham) asks if self-driving carsdor autonomous ve-
hiclesdshould be programmed to ‘murder’ its occupants, rather than to kill
the pedestrians in the event of the classic Trolley problem (Windsor, 2015).
There are varying forms of the Trolley problem; but all of them are character-
ized by the problem of moral justification (Rakowski, 2016, p. 2), and are
described by a central moral dilemma between invoking a deliberate harm,
or rejecting that intent in favour of some unpalatable consequences, and
vice versa (e.g., between intentionally killing an innocent bystander to save
more people on the trolley, or to do nothing and to accept a greater casualty
of those on the trolley). In designing these autonomous technologies, it has
become clear that designers can no longer avoid the subject of morality in tech-
nologies. If so, then it is not so much a question if mediation exists but to what
extent mediation occurs and at what point does this mediation begin to assume
a moral agency similar to the human agent. Invariably, one then has to ask:
can a designer ever be responsible enough to determine, on behalf of other
moral agents, the ethical action through design?
5 Sustainability: a paradox for design?

‘Everything now has to be sustainable .’ (Bruckner, 2013, p. 47). Sustainabil-
ity has become the hegemonic social ethic today. And to this extent, the term
‘sustainability’ has also become almost meaningless (Russ, 2010). In design
and elsewhere, this term has taken on a wide gamut of different mean-
ingsdeverything from limiting the impacts of design on the environment to
a moral obligation for future generations, and perhaps even to assuaging
increasing consumption. But scrutinized more closely, sustainable design
today raises many disconcerting questions.
From one perspective, Fry (2012) suggests that market growth constantly ne-
gates the impact reduction gains of sustainable products. Sustainable design,
which by one formulation is at least to reduce the impact of design on the envi-
ronment, is nullified when the scale of its realization in material and energy
consumption exceeds its aggregate impact reductions. The Jevons’ Paradox
and the Rebound Effect are two well-studied phenomena that point to the par-
adoxical possibility when widespread adoption of sustainable design can turn
out to undermine the original aims for sustainability. From another critical
perspective, sustainable design is perceived to have been hijacked and appro-
priated by agendas wholly unfamiliar, and perhaps even inimical, to its orig-
inal meaning for its morally approbative cover. The highly engineered ‘eco-
cities’ are indeed forms of sustainable development in terms of environmental
performance; but incurring the various costs associated to building new cities
when existing ones still offer ample opportunities for efficient re-adaptation is
not sustainable. Harvey (2010) suggests that (new) urbanization is but a chan-
nel to absorb excess capital to better stabilize capitalism. These two perspec-
tives do not nullify the need for sustainable design. But they do demand
closer scrutiny of what sustainability and sustainable design appear to
promise.
Because sustainable design is a vast discourse, I shall only limit my arguments

to two issues relevant to design ethics. Firstly, sustainability tends to suggest
values associated to conservation, limited use or even, preservation of limited
and especially, non-renewable resources. On the other hand, design tends to
suggest values associated to exploration, experimentalism and expansiveness.
In other words, sustainability tends to have prefigured aims; design does not.
And while sustainability appears to constrain or even restricts, design assumes
nearly the opposite. Admittedly, this relationship is more complex than how it
has been portrayed; after all, it is possible to engage in exploratory and exper-
imental design without consuming non-renewable resources. Yet to design is
to admit to an open-endednessdthat is, to experience epistemic freedom
(d’Anjou, 2010; Protzen & Harris, 2010)dthat is radically different from the
boundedness suggested by the prefigured aims of sustainability.
On this, how designers modulate this freedom in relation to sustainability is

telling. In contrast to d’Anjou’s (2010) view on embracing a kind of Sartrean
freedom in design, Rittel argues that such Sartrean freedom instead inhibits
designers. To design, the designer has to limit this freedom by imposing
some kind of boundariesdtantamount to the imposition of constraining logics
(i.e., ‘Sachswange’) found outside the immediate system of design (Protzen &
Harris, 2010, p. 192). In other words, complete or radical freedom overwhelms
as it also paralyzes (Fromm, 1994). In this context, sustainable standards and
norms then easily become a source of self-justifying constraints used to initiate
and then to justify design. The ecologically justified showcase village of
Huangbaiyu is a case in point (see May, 2011), where existing, local and argu-
ably sustainable practices were eliminated in favour for the sustainable designs
imposed by the designers. Because sustainability is morally approbative and
because design is also incentivized by various institutions (e.g., LEED) to pro-
mote sustainability today, the designer can be led into the moral hazard of pre-
scribing unnecessary ‘sustainable’ features that ought to be avoided in the first
place.
Secondly, while it is possible to design for non-human interests, overwhelm-

ingly design has been deployed to serve human interests. The primacy of posi-
tioning human interests first above all other interests can be argued as a form
of anthropocentricism (Sarkar, 2012), and anthropocentricism has been
argued as the source of the environmental crisis today (Rolston, 2012). Admit-
tedly, not all forms of anthropocentric activities are harmful to the environ-
ment; the transformation of the landscape through irrigation technologies
used to serve human interests, for example, has led to the flourishing of biodi-
versities that otherwise would not occur naturally. Even sodvisibly and over-
whelminglydthe primacy of anthropocentricism has resulted in rapacious
exploitation, environmental degradation, destruction of non-human species,
and harmful wastes: ‘where design is, there is waste’ (Bauman, 2004, p. 30).
If so, then to what extent is it possible to concede to design ethics, when the
subject matter of this ethicsddesigndunderwrites the very source of the envi-
ronmental threat itself?
On this point, design ethics today has little to say. The hegemony of sustain-
able design has endorsed the belief that design is needed to create a more sus-
tainable world. But at the same time, this same belief also conceals the damage
design is incurring. To some extent, this belief is not reproachable, for ‘things
cannot be made ethical without design’ (Fry, 2012, p. 220). Yet because a
robust design ethics has to be self-critical, it is equally important for designers
to question and to confront the various anthropocentric causes that they serve
or materialize through design (Fry, 2004; Parsons, 2016). Even so, this
dilemma is not entirely up to design to resolve. After all, there is still little
consensus today on how to value non-human species independent of anthro-
pocentric values. Do we then grant rivers, trees and other non-human living
or natural entities the same legal rights as a human being (see Roy, 2017)?
While this legal status may well prevent the further destruction of these en-
tities, it is but a proxy protection in the guise of being ‘valued like a human
being’.
Until there is knowledge and consensus on how to value non-human species,

design cannot be actualized to serve non-human causes. In the absence of this
non-anthropocentric valuation system, the obvious recourse is then to extend
proxy protection to non-human species, or to establish areas of conservation,
tantamount to natural protectorates, on natural entities to protect them from
further harm. But on this, the irony cannot be more profound: by creating
these natural protectorates, humans have once more accentuated the distinc-
tion between our artificial world, and the natural world (Rolston, 2012). In do-
ing so, this has just thrown anthropocentricism into sharper reliefdand once
again, by design.
6 Responsibility: a question of design?

What is responsibility in design? According to Fry (2004), responsibility in
design has so far been problematically understood and defineddand mostly
not going beyond the obligation for professional due diligence. Generally, re-
sponsibility has been portrayed in the following two ways (Fry, 2004): the first
entails responsibility to clients and users in the form of a professional ethic or
code of conduct; the second admits to a broader social responsibility not un-
like what Papanek (1985: p. 54) suggests as the ‘social and moral responsibil-
ities of design’. To the extent that this distinction is warranted, it has been
made on practical grounds. Different professional codesdfor example, in ar-
chitecture, planning and engineeringdare needed to address problems and is-
sues peculiar to these different design professions. In other words, this
distinguishes a responsibility to (different) clients, superiors and rules, from a
responsibility for the welfare of others and the environment (Bauman, 2001).
Justly, Fry (2004) argues that the delimited sense of professional ethic as ‘re-
sponsibility to’ is inadequate for evaluating the deeper premises of design
projects and the broader impacts of the designed artefact. After all, a ‘respon-
sibility to’ rules, norms and superiors makes one unwilling to stand up against
dominant institutions or question them even when moral judgment calls for
resistance (Bauman, 2001). Along this line of thought, Marcuse (1976) sug-
gests that professional ethics tends to affirm and consolidate the status quo,
and it cannot be relied upon to improve social inequities. For these reasons,
the professional ethic as ‘responsibility to’ is necessary but not sufficient in
guiding the responsible designer. Yet even if one turns to the perceivably
broaderdand more ontologicald‘responsibility for’, this venue poses its
own challenges. Responsibility is inexorably always personal and contextual;
one is beholden to a specific other, which forms the kernel of responsibility.
Therefore, this ‘responsibility for’ the welfare of others and the environment
may very well play an aspirational role for the responsible designer. But to de-
mand anything beyond this is to venture into a philosophy that leaves duty
without a context, and one that risks obscuring the relation between virtue
and reality (Murdoch, 2014, p. 89).
To bypass this obstacle, it has been suggested that design education offers a
venue for teaching responsible creativity (Maldonado, 1965). Along this line
of thinking, being responsible is less about knowing a priori definitions of
what responsibility entails, but more about the a posteri task of cultivating
a morally responsible designer. A person can know what is good, yet refuses
to do it (Aristotle, 2005). But a good person by definition, does what is
good and proper. Even so, there is some tentativeness in relying on education
to cultivate moral character (Findeli, 2001). This tentativeness is not without
reasons: for in the context of a pluralistic and liberal society, it is not only diffi-
cult to decide what kind of moral character one should cultivate, but also that
character education implies the questionable inculcation of desirable traits and
virtues (Doris, 2003)dbut whose desirable traits and virtues, one asks? More
troublingly, Doris (2003) also discovers that moral behaviour is extraordi-
narily sensitive to variation in circumstance. Drawing on evidence from
moral psychology, Doris questions if there is even such a thing as a ‘moral
character’dan attribute that all practices of character education must first
presume.
But counter-arguments are no less compelling: not only are the methods and
choice of subjects of many experiments in moral psychology questionable,
but also importantly, they rely on fictional moral scenarios to draw conclu-
sions of actual moral realities (Damon & Colby, 2015). Damon and Colby
argue that even if one accepts the moderating influence of circumstances on
moral behaviour, one cannot deny the evidence of a sustained dedication to
a moral cause in cases they have studied, which they further suggest as evi-
dence of moral character. Because philosophical horns remain locked on
this debate, and because there is also well-justified opposition to character ed-
ucation in liberal societies, it is uncertaindinsofar as the science and evidence
goesdif design education can hope to teach anything more than basic moral
reasoning skills and theories in training the responsible designer.
Clearly then, whether one advances by first specifying what responsibility entails
for design, or ventures into virtue ethics as character education, one encounters
nearly insurmountable obstacles. Is there another way to understand design re-
sponsibility, and in tandem, to teach this responsibility without explicitly
invoking character education? One obvious avenuedaltogether neglected by
moral philosophers and psychologistsdresides within the quintessential act of
design itself.
On this, Meadows (2008) presents a possibility where responsibility could be

designed. In her example of designing a new town, the designer could specify
that all parties that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipes
downstream from their outflow pipes (Meadows, 2008, p. 179). This way of
conceiving design is however not new. Burckhardt (2012) calls these the invis-
ible parameters of design in contrast to visible and materialized parameters. In
this case, the designer who recognizes that the moral hazards of free-riding
begin in the materialized (or visible) counterparts of pipes and drains is then
able to design a completedand responsibledsystem: one which no longer di-
vides the world into a realm of objects and (invisible) institutions. A designer
who is able to do this clearly understands responsibility beyond professional
ethics on the one hand, and on the other hand, is motivated to actualize this
moral insight through design. One then wonders if responsibility could then
be taught neither through theoretical ethics nor character education, but prac-
ticed through such a unified form of design itself.
Even so, this approach is not without its own set of problems. Empirically, de-
signers work in systems that are inherited, and formed by, prior design at-
tempts. Considering Meadows’s specific example, one could argue that it is
very rare for a designer to have complete discretion over a complete design sys-
tem. But more importantly, design ethics again questions if designers ought to
be given this discretiondeven if it were possibledto design responsibility. In
contrast to Latour’s (1992) version on moral artefactsdfor example automatic
door-closers and automated seatbelts, which ‘clean up after us (i.e., the irre-
sponsible ‘us’)’dMeadows’s approach alters something deeper and more sys-
temic in the constitution of our lifeworlds. On the surface it appears to
naturalize the volition for responsibility. But in substance, this volition is
merely obliged by the starker realities of self-preservation.
7 Conclusion: a way forward?

Ironically but unsurprisingly, the onset of the Anthropocene has coincided
with the dissolution of many forms of traditional morality and ethics
(Gardner, 2012). For this reason, there has never been so little wise counsel
and guidance in the face of so many novel burdens for decision-making today
(Ihde, 1990). In view of the potential ramificationsdand very likely, irrevers-
ible harmsdunintentionally caused by design decisions in the Anthropocene,
it appears counter-productive to either eschew design ethics, or outrightly to
dismiss ethics as a productive field of insights for the human condition (see,
for example, Moeller, 2009). This article could be seen as a defence of the para-
mount need for ethics in design today.
In this article, I have defined design ethics by building on the work of other
practitioners and researchers. Following this, I have specified this ethics by us-
ing the conceptual vehicles of three categories commonly encountered in de-
signdnamely, ‘technology’, ‘sustainability’, and ‘responsibility’dto draw
further insights on ethics for design. If my arguments have been sound, then
not only have they demonstrated that ethics is integral to design in many
ways, but also that design, in the respective front presented by each of these
three categories, has advanced to a point where ethics can no longer be ignored
at our common peril.
At different junctures in this article however, it is also clear that ethics has re-
vealed more frustrating puzzles than concrete answers for design. This is espe-
cially salient on the question of responsibility to determinedor to designdthe
ethical valuations in autonomous technologies, and on the contention if
‘responsible systems’ ought to be designed even if designers have the capacity
to do so. Parsons (2016: p. 149) rightly thinks that the designer is in no position
to either foist her values on any of the users, and is no more entitled to legislate
these values than any other citizen on someone else through design. The dam-
age and dangers posed by those who pretended to be ‘philosopher-kings’, espe-
cially through large-scale system designs, should never be underestimated (see
Popper, 1971). In light of the complexity but also danger, designers may want
to consider allowing a distinct specialist to handle the ethical issues encoun-
tered in design (Parsons, 2016, p. 151).
This is one way forward for design ethics, where designers return to the tech-
nical, aesthetic or other professional matters that concern them, while making
room for an ethicistdwho presumably is interested in designdto do the neces-
sary ethical analysis and draw the ethical conclusion. There is no denying that
this division of moral labour has an intuitive appeal; there is also no denying
that ethics is complex, and designers are generally not well-equipped to tackle
this complexity head-on. But undeniably, ethics is also formative to the moral
development and growth of the design disciplines especially in the Anthropo-
cene, when new ethical issues and problems are anticipated to emerge from
man-made artifacts and systems. To ‘sub-contract’ ethics in design to ethicists
in this context thendparallel to practices found in certain hospitals where eth-
icists accompany doctors managing complex medical casesdneither
eliminates any genuine ethical problem that would be encountered, nor per-
mits the formative moral growth of designers.
This does not mean that designers then confront ethical problems recklessly or
become recalcitrant to the expertise of ethicists on these problems. But it does
mean deferring the involvement of ethicists until designers have sufficiently
wrestled with the ethical issues and problems at close range. Doctors or med-
ical specialists usually do not create the issues and problems that require the
attention of an ethicist-in-waiting; but designers usually can anticipate ethical
issues and problems, or else indirectly and haplessly, bring them into existence
through design. In either or both relations that designers are likely to maintain
with the design activity in the Anthropocene, a kernel of the designerly con-
science is formed. And this conscience at least demands that designers do
not relinquish their internal struggle with ethics anytime soon.
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Design ethics: Reﬂecting on the ethical

dimensions of technology, sustainability, and

Keywords: design theory, philosophy of design, technology, design activity,

2 The signiﬁcance of ethics in the Anthropocene

2 Design Studies Vol -- No. -- Month 2017

3 Deﬁning design ethics: distinction and content

The ethical dimensions of design in the Anthropocene 3

4 Design Studies Vol -- No. -- Month 2017

If this distinction is warranted, why then should ‘design ethics’ be preferred

4 Technology: from instrumentality to the morality of

The ethical dimensions of design in the Anthropocene 5

Is there then another paradigm to develop design ethics in relation to technol-

6 Design Studies Vol -- No. -- Month 2017

But in the mediation paradigm, it is no longer clear if moral agency resides in

The ethical dimensions of design in the Anthropocene 7

5 Sustainability: a paradox for design?

Because sustainable design is a vast discourse, I shall only limit my arguments

8 Design Studies Vol -- No. -- Month 2017

On this, how designers modulate this freedom in relation to sustainability is

Secondly, while it is possible to design for non-human interests, overwhelm-

The ethical dimensions of design in the Anthropocene 9

Until there is knowledge and consensus on how to value non-human species,

6 Responsibility: a question of design?

10 Design Studies Vol -- No. -- Month 2017

The ethical dimensions of design in the Anthropocene 11

On this, Meadows (2008) presents a possibility where responsibility could be

7 Conclusion: a way forward?

12 Design Studies Vol -- No. -- Month 2017

The ethical dimensions of design in the Anthropocene 13

14 Design Studies Vol -- No. -- Month 2017

The ethical dimensions of design in the Anthropocene 15

16 Design Studies Vol -- No. -- Month 2017

The ethical dimensions of design in the Anthropocene 17

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