‘Ethical’ design – or the ethic of progress?

Years ago, I saw the great US graphic design writer Stephen Heller address a big crowd of students in London. He described setting his American students a project to design an election poster for the Democratic Party. I asked whether he would ever set a similar project for the Republicans. He did not reply.

Even now, ‘Never design for a cigarette company’ looks like remaining the key ethical insight for designers for many more years to come. And just as the Republican Party is akin to, and backed by, Big Tobacco, so we’re unlikely to see many or any student projects to design for Jeb Bush. And still fewer for Donald Trump. Nor should you, to display your virtue in future, ever design anything at all related to Big Oil, Big Food, Big Pharma, the military-industrial complex, the banks, Sports Utility Vehicles, houses on the Green Belt, the Severn Barrage, gambling and payday lenders, or fizzy drinks, plastic bags and bags of sugar. Oh, and while you’re about it, don’t touch tabloid newspapers, lads’ mags, the Dorchester hotel, Israel, Russia and, for good measure and most recently, Hungary.

No, to have rectitude, we will be designing smaller tableware so people eat smaller portions of food (indeed, a movement advocating that has already started in the US). We will nudge the plebs, without them noticing it, into more sustainable behavior, better health outcomes, smart cities (Boris Johnson is a fan) and resilient cities (the Rockefeller Foundation promotes 100). We will design out crime, design to bring communities together, and break our hearts about the millions of plastic toothbrushes to be found whirling around the Pacific. As the 1 September issue of Fortune magazine implored, we will want ‘conscious’ capitalism, ‘shared value’ capitalism, ‘inclusive’ capitalism, ‘compassionate’ capitalism and ‘just’ capital. Following Jeremy Corbyn, we will want to design for long-term, ‘patient’ capital; similarly, we will join McKinsey managing director Dominic Barton, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Democratic Party hopeful Hillary Clinton, Observer columnist Will Hutton and Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane in inveighing against ‘quarterly capitalism’. Always and everywhere, and especially in the design departments of universities, we will be right-on, ethical, and carry a low-carbon LED halo.

Yet there is an alternative view. Design used to be about maximising convenience, cheapness, maintainability, versatility, beauty and universality; in a word, it was about human progress. Now and for the foreseeable future, design will mainly be about minimising people’s carbon footprint, their water footprint, their food miles and their waste. In short, it will be about minimising people’s impact on the world – and, that of design. However, eventually dissent from what JK Galbraith called the conventional wisdom will surface. Without returning to the Keynesian condescension of modernism, without bluffing about ‘seamless’ IT, a younger generation of designers will want to put their shoulders behind the ethic of raising humanity from a world of needless toil.

Those designers will design for higher productivity, mechanisation and the mass manufacture of housing. They will explain, visualise, prototype, popularise and argue for scientific and technological advance, and the taking of risks in the cause of innovation. They will want to go designing laboratories and laboratory equipment. They will want to inspire R&D departments to find great new applications for their work. And they will look to see how they can deploy carbon, not just to lower the weight of planes, cars and bikes, but also in nanotubes, flexible electronics and, through recycled biomass, in packaging, clothing, high-performance plastics and transport fuels.

Last, the ethical designers of the future will look to what are still derided as ‘technological fixes’ to solve the problem of climate change. Indeed at Loughborough and Wilton, a small firm, Air-Fuel Synthesis, hints at the sort of benefits design will one day seek from carbon. The company will spend £9m on a plant that uses renewable energy to strip the Earth’s atmosphere of some of Britain’s Victorian emissions of CO2 and so manufacture 1.2m litres of petrol a year from methanol. By 2025, Air-Fuel Synthesis believes, it will synthesise 10m tons of synthetic fuel a year.

Humanity was not born evil. Every problem thrown up by mankind is an opportunity. That is the kind of ethics we should promulgate and strive for.