The ethical designer
What harm could come from helping an elderly lady?
So last month I got this great design gig.
An elderly lady wanted to commission me to do a sign for her. She lives in the forest and doesn’t get a lot of visitors because her house is quite hard to find. The money is great and I get creative freedom to do the sign like I want it to be. Score!
She wants the sign to be fun and appeal to children. And I’m like aww, what a sweet old lady.
I don’t ask many questions and I make a super fun and engaging sign. It totally stands out in this rather dark and spooky forest.
I pat myself on the back for a job well done and for making an old lady happy.
A few weeks pass and I read in the newspaper that there are two children missing from the neighbourhood, a brother and a sister (this is obviously a hypothetical story, so no worries).
I’m horrified by the news like everyone in the village. Everyone tries to do their best to help but the children are nowhere to be found.
A few weeks later the children resurface — alive, thankfully. The shocking thing was that apparently the children were held captive in the sweet old lady’s house in the forest! OMG! I know, right!? What did I do!?
The children were shaken, obviously, but what was so strange was that they were chubbier.
I mean usually when people turn up after being held captive for months they tend to have lost a lot of weight after being poorly nourished…
But not Hansel & Gretel; they seemed to be fine apart from a few cavities. And no, I obviously had no idea that the nice old lady who had commissioned me to do the sign was the witch from a fairytale by the Brothers Grimm!
Yes, I could say that the witch had cast a spell on me, and therefore not take any responsibility for the sign I created that led to the poor children being captured.
Or, I could have formed a better understanding of why the old lady wanted the sign to be so attractive to children. I mean this could have ended badly.
Navigating the world today is complicated and it can be pretty easy to follow the wrong sign, where the ending can be a lot scarier than an old lady feeding you too much candy.
As designers it feels like we need to be more careful than ever and make sure we don’t lure people into the depths of the dark forest where they can easily get lost and are, most certainly, always being followed.
