From Constructive Ethics to Sustainable Ethics: The Design Path

Abstract

The perception of the ethical responsibility of design has gone through various phases along the XXth century. Initially centered on the rescue of the traditional social structures shaken by the Industrial Revolution, design later undertook an active role on the construction of a new society, coherent with the demands imposed by the reformulation of the technological progress. As the century went along new approaches came up, less concerned with social issues, focused on esthetics or on logics, developing itself according to the demands of the expansion of consumption and the well being notion associated to it. However, this emphasis on consumption lead to extremes that ended by arousing a new social consciousness initially focused on the environmental issue and later extended to matters such as justice and equity. In the XXIst century, the new ethical orientations that guide design demand that its exercise of social responsibility go beyond the production field; it must bring its contribution to the conduction of a process of reeducation of society, based on new forms of well being, that would attain a larger part of the population and at the same time keep itself within the limits of the planet resources. This paper retraces the evolution of design concerns and stresses the importance of the ethical orientation of its proposals in the globalized and fragmented context of the beginning of the XXIst century.