How Ethical Are You?

Milton Glaser whom is best known for his I Love NY logo and his Bob Dylan poster created a questionnaire called Shown below is The road to Hell which demonstrates how ethics play upon our personal conscience when designing and creating products.

1 Designing a package to look bigger on the shelf.
2 Designing an ad for a slow, boring film to make it seem like a light hearted comedy.
3 Designing a crest for a new vineyard to suggest that it has been in business for a long time.
4 Designing a jacket for a book whose sexual content you find personally repellent.
5 Designing a medal using steel from the World Trade Center to be sold as a profit-making souvenir of September 11th.
6 Designing an advertising campaign for a company with a history of known discrimination in minority hiring.
7 Designing a package aimed at children for a cereal whose contents you know are low in nutritional value and high in sugar.
8 Designing a line of T-shirts for a manufacturer that employs child labour.
9 Designing a promotion for a diet product that you know doesn't work.
10 Designing an ad for a political candidate whose policies you believe would be harmful to the general public.
11 Designing a brochure for an SUV that flips over frequently in emergency conditions and is known to have killed 150 people.
12 Designing an ad for a product whose frequent use could result in the user's death.

These twelve steps show us how easy it can be to drop from step to step. Ranging from packaging to causing death. Nigel Whiteley says in his book Design for Society “’Design’ as a noun or verb was daily intoned – usually hopefully rather than purposefully – as a solution that was going to deliver us from all economic evils”. This demonstrates how we as designers must think of the values included within the work. As designers we think of the responsibility and how that responsibility can be diffused with the more people involved, creating a safety in numbers system. This system can be found within Stanley Milligrams shock generator experiment as well as raising a number of questions such as what ethical issues does the Milligram test expose? Are the test subjects behaving ethically? Is the experiment ethical?