Design Ethically Toolkit View website

Taking time to consider the ethical consequences behind decisions is necessary. There’s just too much at stake today with the complexity and reach of our accelerating, technological advances. There’s also the fact that we often don’t know what we don’t know…until it’s too late. We are at a point where technology is advancing so quickly that governing bodies cannot keep up. Any regulation we see today seems to happen after the fact, when the damage has already been done. While “regulation” may sound scary to companies, it has its place in society for a reason. If the government cannot catch up, then companies themselves need to shoulder some ethical responsibility and regulate themselves.

Designers have the privilege (and burden) of wielding a lot more power than we ever had in the existence of our profession. Now and even more so in upcoming years, we will be designing products that have the ability to dramatically influence millions of users. In John Maeda’s Design in Tech Report 2018, we see that the important design decisions of the future will be focused around incredibly advanced technology that, depending on its application, can save countless lives or wreak havoc. Our unlicensed influence as designers has been compared to that of licensed doctors and lawyers. With that amount of power comes an enormous amount of responsibility as well.