Professional Practice, MFA, Media Design
As a media designer, there will be times when one will be faced with ethical issues and moral dilemmas. Some of these issues will include social responsibility, piracy, plagiarism, copyright issues, images usage right, legal contracts, sustainability, and crowdsourcing to name a few. To aid in understanding and carefully help in making the right decisions the AIGA has a guideline in ethics that assist in weighing several factors to make the proper decision for the designer. Ethics can be subjective with no hard and fast rules that are governed by law so empowering yourself with a higher sense of responsibility and using these guidelines will create a framework of self-moral codes that can be adopted and practiced. As a professional media designer taking the moral high road will always lead to less stress because there will be no need to internalize right or wrong decisions.
The second takeaway from this course is the protection of your original design creations. AIGA states that “An artist’s copyright is owned by the artist and is protected from the moment it is created by the 1976 Copyright Act. This protection covers the work for the artist’s lifetime plus 70 years. If agreed to in writing, the copyright may be assigned elsewhere” (pp. 51). A media designer needs to be able to prove ownership unless there was an ownership transfer. The easiest way is to register a copyright before the design is made public which will establish the ownership’s specific date and time. When dealing with a client using a non-disclosure agreement or imposing confidentially can also help in protecting design work. All designers should maintain a vested interest in protecting their work and using the laws that have been provided to claim and retain ownership and control over their work.
Third, one very important guideline from the AIGA and comes from the Standards of Professional Practice states: “A professional designer shall respect the dignity of all audiences and shall value individual differences even as they avoid depicting or stereotyping people or groups of people in a negative or dehumanizing way” (pp. 35). This directly reflects the designer’s responsibility to society and the environment. As a media designer one should never infringe upon another person or group that would discredit, discriminate or do harm to others. This is an important issue that must be confronted and corrected at every turn. Designers need to design across cultures and stay clear of any hasty generalizations. One should never pass judgment on people based on culture or stereotyping.
AIGI. (2009). DESIGN BUSINESS ETHICS. New York, NK: Richard Grefe, AIGI. Page 48. Paragraph 4. Retrieved September 20, 2017
The major project for this course was to create an experience map to show my journey through the MFA, Media Design course by creating a holistic, human-centered view. The experience map was charted by creating a compelling visual and verbal diagram that captured the essence of my individual story through the highs and lows during the last twelve months.
Part 1:
The story began by organizing thoughts on sticky note with the categories of Thinking, Feeling and Doing. They were organized into a rough map showing highs and lows.
Part 2:
The organized rough map was then used to chart the content and create a sketch that showed the peaks and valleys in a diagram form.
Final:
Finally, the experience map was created. Viewing this project from the standpoint that we are designers and we don’t need to fit everything into the same size and color box, so I set out to make it different. I created the experience map from the point of view of racing motocross which is my passion next to design.
