OUGD505 - Ethics and Sustainability Seminar

As an introductory seminar for this module we were introduced to ethics and sustainability in graphic design. The seminar was focusing on the importance of ethics in graphic design and what is considered good design.

As a group we had to brainstorm what we thought of the importance of ethics in graphic design, the image above lists our responses. One of my additions to the brainstorm was ethics allowing the brief to have restriction, when a graphic designer works to brief they hope for restrictions which create structures and helps work to the requirements of the client. Other answers we thought of included, allowing you to consider the audience in more depth. An example of this is to consider culture, race, gender and religion when taking audience into account when undertaking a brief. Another question we had to work on as a group was what good design is? Collectively we thought that this rather subjective, but good design can be well informed and considered responses to a problem. To take it further good design can push you to better yourself and do more, subsequently when considering ethics and sustainability this can lead to furthering your work.

What is Sustainable design?
Sustainable design which can also be called environmental design is the idea of designing physical objects, environments, and services to work with the principles of social, economic, and ecological sustainability.

Financial 
Designing financially viable work focuses on the issues that affect the costs of distribution and production. On the other hand if designers focus too much on cost cutting or profit making, a potential disadvantage is that the results will be obsolete and boring.

Social 
This is whether the overall design benefits society as a whole.

Personal 
Creating personal design work is about fulfilling the requirements of a individual consumer.

Environmental
Environmental design is about considering the natural resources in the production process.

In the seminar we were given a number of texts from famous designers such as Stephen Heller about ethics and sustainability in design. We had to read through each text then select three ethical beliefs we would like to include within our own practice, the beliefs I selected are below:

• 'Make it honest, make it relevant'
• 'Good design presumably serves many citizens'
• 'Political and social concerns

Below are image of another task we undertook, at first I didn't fully grasp what the chart was for exactly. As I steadily got more of an idea of what it does then I seen its relevance and we used the D&AD Fur For Animals brief as an example of how this financial, social, environmental and personal chart can work.