1. The elephant in the room for #designethics is if you design things for a corporation you inherit their ethics, or lack their-of, whether you notice it or not.
2. Corporations have a primary obligation for their own profit - and it is well known that ethical considerations are, shall we say, "hard to monetize."
3. Evidence: seat belts in cars arrived through the threat of legislation, despite the patents for it being free (thx Volvo!). The tobacco industry had to be dragged kicking and screaming to admit to their own research about addiction.
4. Businesses are rewarded for finding externalities, to have costs incurred by others, as this increases profits. The history of industrial pollution is about externalities - it's cheaper to dump waste in public rivers/parks (free!) than to actually pay for its proper disposal.
5. Exploiting externalities is a business strategy all on its own (see the history of the Internet or the tragedy of the commons).
6. So when Netflix CEO Hastings says “we actually compete with sleep.. and we’re winning” it’s a reflection of profit and market share concerns over the very health of his own customers (an externality).
7. Even if as a designer you have great autonomy to make “design choices”, the landscape of what the products are, what the goals are and what the business strategy is, decisions made by executives who’s obsession is profit and growth, shapes the design before you even start.
8. Of course any designer should work to influence the corporate strategy and find ways to raise ethics and profits simultaneously. However, the cultural rewards (raises, promotions) for improving profits are almost guaranteed to be higher than for improving ethics.
9. There are many ways to define how corporations work - but the dominant one, especially for publicly traded stocks that are obligated to serve shareholders and not just customers, has a clear and undeniable history every designer should understand.
10. Ethics often comes down to power. A policy or guideline is just a bunch of words that can be ignored. It's ONLY when the person with the power to uphold a policy and pay for it does so that an ethical standard becomes real.
