Alan J. Reid
Ethics - to put it concisely - is ’mindful well-being’. It is a set of standards that guides how we treat ourselves, one another, and the environment. When we design things for public use, we also communicate an ethical perspective. When we use things designed for us, we adopt their ethics. This book synthesizes several different disciplines as they relate to design, ethics, and the built environment. Our objects, according to philosophers like Ihde, Verbeek, and Latour, mediate our experiences with the world around us. Through their designs (and, by extension, our perceived affordances), we largely comply with what our objects and spaces want us to do. At the micro-level, the phones in our pockets command our attentive processes in order to feed an attention economy. At the macro level, urban planning and infrastructure can both promote inclusivity and foment violence. We are deeply intertwined with the objects and spaces that have been designed for us. Baked into every object, process, system, and environment are the remnants of the designer’s morals, ethics, values, and biases. Importantly, this book seeks to cultivate mindfulness of the reader’s interactions with their surrounding world, providing them with a line of inquiry that questions areas of unethical design in their built environment and offers useful critiques and new solutions to these ethical dilemmas. We often have the power to reject those things that are irresponsibly designed and unethical in nature, and it is through this agency as users that we can demand better from designers, developers, and companies. It is imperative to understand our mediated relationships with the built environment that surrounds us and the objects within it; this can help explain our behaviors and empower us to make ethical decisions that serve future generations.
