Design and the Ethics of Spider-Man

Spending a week in the rarefied air of Aspen, Colorado remains a treat for me, even though Aspen lies a mere 3 1/2 hours and 3000 vertical feet from my doorstep in Denver. As a representative of Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design I was privileged to attend the Aspen Design Summit, and hear moving and provocative presentations from a great number of social, environmental, and educational change-agents.

To reform the venerable IDCA into a conference centered around altruism and social responsibility seems to be optimistic, to say the least, and reflects great credit upon an organization whose former primary Ethical output could be distilled down to: Don’t steal from your clients, vendors, or other designers; don’t reveal your clients’ secrets; try to keep the environmental impact of your design solutions to a minimum.

These efforts seem to fall short of the mark. Perhaps it is because I encountered it at a liminal point in my youth, but Uncle Ben’s exhortation to a newly enhanced Peter Parker still rings in my mind: “With great power there must also come — great responsibility!” Designers occupy a key and influential position in the relationship between Industry and the consumer. As designers, what responsibilities have we assumed to act as ethical citizens in the trans-media network of conversations?

After the close of the event, I had a conversation with John Thackara, where we discussed the role of designers in facilitating social change. For me, my most vivid realization of the conference came while listening to the extended presentation of Maurice Cox‘s redesign of the Bayview community. Maurice spoke of one of the Bayview’s residents, Alice Coles, as a key figure in the reconstruction and community mobilization effort. Maurice went to great lengths to point out that without the efforts and community mobilization that Alice contributed, his project would have never come to fruition.

A designer is a partner, perhaps even a catalyst in creating social change. As an outsider, the designer does not have the privileged knowledge of the system that they are trying to effect. Without active dialog and iterative testing of solutions with local agents, in local environments, Design Intervention will be at best, ineffectual, at worst, a detriment. But, Design applied judiciously, with respect to and dialog with the individuals that one is trying to help, might actually make things better.