Seminar / Special Topics
Theory and Ethics of Design
Design judgment begins with examining what design is for.
Theory and Ethics of Design asked students to move beyond technique and examine the ideas, values, histories, and consequences that shape professional practice. Through reading, lecture, discussion, writing, and peer critique, students developed their own positions rather than treating established design principles as neutral or universal.
The course culminated in a personal code of ethics and a final design-principles book. Students were expected to connect theoretical positions to the decisions they will make in practice: what they produce, whose interests they serve, what systems they reinforce, and when professional responsibility requires resistance.
Course Structure
Four Parts
+Design Foundations | What constitutes design, who is recognized as a designer, and how design relates to established professions.
+Design Theory | Modernist principles, function, expression, beauty, subjectivity, minimalism, maximalism, and the relationship between timelessness and trend.
+Expanded Perspectives | Non-Western and Indigenous perspectives complicated dominant definitions of good design and introduced other relationships among beauty, material, culture, and the natural world.
+Design Ethics | Students considered environmental impact, accessibility, economics, consumption, safety, security, artificial intelligence, and the designer's responsibility to individuals and society.
My Approach
Forming Principles Under Pressure
I teach this course because design education cannot focus only on what students are capable of making. It also has to help them decide what is worth making, who benefits, who bears the consequences, and what responsibilities accompany the ability to shape other people's choices and environments.
The semester begins with definitions because the boundaries of design are neither fixed nor innocent. We look at how modernist ideas established enduring standards of function, restraint, expression, and beauty, but we also examine what those standards leave out. Non-Western and Indigenous perspectives create an essential interruption, allowing students to see that values presented as universal often emerge from particular histories and cultures.
My goal is not to hand students a single correct position. It is to help them form principles they can explain, test, and use when decisions become complicated, including the willingness to question a client, a brief, a technology, or one's own assumptions.
Student Experience