Our next edition of Speculative Futures Berlin is coming up soon! We hope you'll join us at Ellery Studio on July 8th for a talk with Cade Diehm that explores ethics in design.
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Can design ethics save design? As the broader design community becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the structures and clients it serves, a growing movement seeks to integrate ethics into design practice. But this prioritizes individual decisions and values over critical analysis of socio-political and economic outcomes. The pop discourse that calls for ethics obfuscates some of the problems inherent in their work, resulting in the celebration of projects that are, at their core, problematic; such as digital wellness, decentralized systems, autonomous cars, and inclusive facial recognition.
Building on the essay “On Weaponized Design,” and an ongoing multi-year research and practice project with Tactical Tech and others, this talk explores how notions of ethics and self-regulation have slipped into the absurd. It examines how the framing of 'design ethics' threatens to neutralize both the critique of outcomes and to limit the potentials of design speculation to contribute to a radically reimagined world.
