History has shown the close link between social events and concerns and design.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and following the dictates of the industrial economy of the time, the designers’ task was primarily to help mass-produce objects to meet the consumption needs of the public.

Between the seventies and the end of the nineties, and in the midst of an ideological crisis caused by the arrival of postmodern thought, came new technologies and with them the need to make a qualitative leap to shape new artifacts with unparalleled solutions. New artifacts that, once on the market, have highlighted even more the existing gap between social classes that led to the beginning of industrialization.

We are currently moving from an industrial economy to an information and knowledge economy or, as others call it, to a post-industrial economy. We live surrounded by artifacts, all of them the same, where the only strategy the designers have to differentiate a product from the rest, and thus continue to pursue the same commercial purposes of three centuries ago, is to focus the practice on incorporating all sorts of symbolic values to these objects rather than qualitative ones. The Catalan plastic artist and designer Jordi Pericot described, in 2002, this new inertia of the discipline in the article Design and its responsibilities for the future as follows: «Born out of the desire to adapt and subordinate the environment to human needs, design has become a persuasive strategy that understands the object as a simple impetus for programmed and mass consumption. In the world of the privileged, the objects of design no longer compete for their function, but for their symbolic or differentiating addition».

There’s an increasing number of authors who, like Pericot, are calling for the urgency to include ethics in our practice and put people at the centre of every project. Enzio Manzini, an Italian academic and design author known for his work in design for social innovation and sustainability, or Josep M. Martí-Font, the journalist and writer with a law degree, insist that every artifact around us conditions and directly influences our behaviour. And they consider that if we do not take into account the ethical component in everything we create, we will continue to legitimize only the interests of capital over the interests of individuals. Martí-Font in the article Design and ethics published in 1986 stated that «Any reflection that only takes into account the poetic, significant or technological aspects of design without the counterweight of the social and ethical dimension,  no matter how much critical pretention it wants to provide, will only be able to legitimize the current practice. One can reflect on the practice without questioning its current «status», but it will necessarily be uncritical and will only legitimize and «improve» the means of current design and its collaboration with the established powers in order to continue to influence consumption habits, perpetuate the alienation it generates and cover up with ideology what is really only in the interest of the class that controls production.» Manzini, in addition to incorporating ethics into the profession, proposes that, in order to build a better world, new design knowledge be defined: «design knowledge that, in my opinion, is desperately needed if we want to join the battle for a sustainable world with a greater hope of victory.»

In a similar vein we find the perspectives of designer and educator Victor Papanek or the designer and author of several books Mike Monteiro. Both, although belonging to different eras, emphasize the high impact on people of what we do and insist that ethics must be considered from the first moment we start a project, because depending on our decisions, we can help or harm anyone who comes in contact with what we have created. Papanek, in his 1974 book Design for the Real World, defines designers as a dangerous race from the moment they can design unsafe cars that kill nearly a million people in the world each year, or from the moment they choose materials or methods that pollute the landscape or the air we breathe. A statement probably radical by some, but of resounding relevance almost fifty years later.

We know that human beings need a healthy body and environment to be able to live, so when we talk about people’s interests, we are also talking about the planet’s interests. These two realities are often understood independently, but German design theorist Gert Selle integrates them when defining what to him should be the main horizon of the profession: «Design must mean: configuration of a human environment. And shaping a human environment means: opposition to everything that prevents a human environment, while creating and anticipating concrete utopias for tomorrow.» Selle, like other authors we will see below, claims the need for a preventative approach in any design process. They all agree that making a better future requires new socio-economic policies and that we, as designers, help make the world a better place than we found it.

In addition to the impact of our work on people’s health and environmental sustainability, there are also other relationship and discrimination issues that make many individuals increasingly at risk of exclusion. Current researcher Clara Mallart warns us that «The most obvious problems in designing without an ethical perspective are those related to discrimination based on gender, race, age, ideology, etc. » and adds that «Creating methodologies, tools or techniques for detecting these problems during design processes will be important in building a future that embraces equity and equality among all beings on this planet, human and non-human, and that respects time and planetary structure so that it continues to sustain life as we know it. »

We live in an unequal society that, as Mallart points out, needs new preventive measures of inclusion that facilitate coexistence. The abyss between the First World and the Third World as well as the rise of terrorism are causing irreversible immigration pressure and design, as a discipline linked to the interests of the people, should be involved in the management of these conflicts. In this regard, Pericot also claims the need to reduce distances between polarities. «We must look for coexistence solutions that guarantee the legitimate demand for global security, but that are not based on the search for the enemy or on the increase in military spending and war projects, but on the construction and consolidation of a new model that changes militarization for prevention, that seeks the rapprochement between the north and the south and that is committed to the environment.»

Most authors agree that people and the planet must be prioritized over the interests of capitalism and that individuals must no longer be treated as mere consumers. They claim that a paradigm shift in the profession would help to refute the situation and soften the most pessimistic forecasts for the future. Clive Dilnot, a professor of design studies, also insists that we must defend the dignity of the people to whom our work is addressed, be demanding of ethics as an exercise of constant research and learning, adopt a more demanding attitude in designing and understanding our work as a militant practice in the service of people and sustainability.

The profession has begun to question its own structures and to detect what its responsibilities are. It may seem difficult to know for sure what life will be like in the future, but not to look at what has been the real social and environmental impact of the strategies and decisions we have taken so far. As Victor Margolin would say, «As creators of models, prototypes, and proposals, designers occupy a dialectical space between the world that is and the world that could be. Informed by the past and the present, our activity is oriented towards the future. This is a collective task for the design community, as our vision for the future will continue to determine how we live in the present.»

Ingrid Picanyol. December, 2021