Ethical Designer = Ethical Citizen
In the introduction and the first section of their book Citizen Designer, Steven Heller and Katherine McCoy discuss the responsibility of designers to communicate honestly within a marketing context and to consider the ethical reflexivity of their designs. Heller mentions the Enron logo, designed by Paul Rand in 1996. “Rand’s mark was created to bond Enron’s workforce to the corporate culture while branding the company’s positive assets on the nation’s consciousness.” After Enron cheated and duped their employees and investors in 2002, the modernist logo is an icon of corporate greed and ethical decay, which may play into the wave of logo re-designs that visually distanced themselves from the aesthetic.
Of course, Paul Rand couldn’t have had the foresight to know Enron would collapse ethically, and we don’t have it either. Designers have to watch for their own ethical decay, but how can we track our own ethical roadmap? Heller references Milton Glaser’s Road to Hell, a questionnaire that lists possible design works with increasing ethical decay. For example, number one reads “designing a package to look bigger on the shelf,” while number ten reads “designing an ad for a political candidate whose policies you believe would be harmful to the general public.”
"Before the U.S. congratulates itself too much on the demise of Communism, we must remember that our American capitalist democracy is not what it used to be, either. Much of our stagnation comes from this breakdown of values. Entrepreneurial energy and an optimistic work ethic have deteriorated into individual self-interest, complacency, corporate greed, and resentment between ethnic groups and economic classes. Our traditional common American purpose is fading-- that sense of building something new where individuals could progress through participating in a system that provided opportunity." It’s easy for a designer to fall into ethical dilemmas in our country, when the need and the encouragement to sell out are ever present. The only way to be an ethical designer is to be an ethical citizen. It’s imperative that we understand that our design is what causes that emotional response that may lead a child to choose unhealthy food, a parent to buy sexualized pre teen fashion, or a voter to cast one for a harmful candidate. Designers are as responsible as our clients for the repercussions our work has on society. In the First Things First Manifesto, over thirty designers(including Milton Glaser, Tibor Kalman, and Erik Spiekermann, to name a few), signed their names in a unified call against the increased commercialization of design. They had the foresight to predict the negative changes mass bombardments of marketing to the daily lives of people were causing.
“There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills”
