Design for Decency

Design for Decency

Preamble: Design stewardship is an initiative to raise self-awareness in the practice of industrial and product design while continuing to keep forward progress through innovation, new material exploration, and embracing technological advances. Like art history, as design matures, it is important to recognize that with each new product or service that is integrated into our history we recognize its effect on future object interactions. The benefits of design stewardship, for example, are what is presently lacking in social media technology.

When telephones were more like strung cans than Walkie-Talkies, they were tied (literally) to the homes where etiquette and decorum were enforced. Phone privacy went two ways:
it was something that was not only given to others, but had to be taken for yourself.  For instance, while you were not (supposed) to listen in on others conversations (because it was fun and easy to do), similarly you took phone calls out of the room if others were in it. This was not an easy feat! The radius of conversation was anchored to one of two phone jacks in a small home, which were tugged, dragged, and whipped to a secluded spot. The structure of technology, because it was limited, was easily self-governed. The guidelines were laid out by the likes of Emily Post, the end-all authority of etiquette. While her legacy lives on in a form, it is time that technology supports valued forms of behavior in society. Is there a self regulating application that knows to silence my phone in a movie theater, or even the dinner table of a residence- much less in a nice restaurant? Would it be a stretch to disable texting from the drivers seat in a moving vehicle? I can't count the times I've wanted a pocket e-bomb on the subway or whenever the free use of technology encroaches unwontedly, dangerously into the lives of the public.

Whoa, what?! This is design heresy! Products should reflect the behaviors of people- not direct them!

To that I say, even adults require teaching tools from time to time, and it may be safe to say that the time has come. Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers Freshman, committed suicide this last month after his college roommate illicitly recorded and distributed Clementi's sexual activity online. Lawyers are now navigating several legal offenses including the invasion of privacy, collecting images showing sexual content or nudity without the subject's consent, and transmitting the relevant content. This follows on the heels of NPR's short and poignant article Tyler Clementi and the Virtual Death of Decency. Due to the orientation of the sexual act, the role that technology plays in this incident has been greatly overlooked. As the author, Michel Martin, points out, "so much of technological innovation has outstripped the moral code to regulate it".  And yet, there is no apparent regulation of technology. While the actions of Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei are their own and only they should be held accountable, it is not out of the realm of imagination that they will be given leniency for being born in... well, the nineties. For as much exposure to the world teenagers might have via the internet, they still remain sheltered in young adulthood-where apparently they haven't been taught the mores that were inherited from analog times.

So, who are the "stewards of design"? If the answer is designers then this sounds like the  kind of autological question that pervades most grad school theory nonsense. Sorry, designers are the stewards of design. While the subject of What is Good Design? has kept art and design critics very busy over the last ten years, it has been mostly in respect to form, function, and innovation. Not until only recently when factions like "discursive design" were recognized could designers address issues other than performance through the medium of design, and we couldn't ask for a more powerful, democratic venue than the industrial process.