Source: Ethics can’t be a side hustle – Dear Design Student, by Mike Monteiro
Where can you do good work? The answer is so obvious as to be painful. Right where you stand. That’s where you do good work.
You can’t buy ethics offsets for the terrible things you do at your day job.
Ethics in design: Should the poor behavior of big businesses concern the designers that work for them?
How is this even a question? How is ethics in design (or tech) even debatable? Can you imagine any other industry debating whether they needed to consider ethics? … when other industries behave unethically we get upset.
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As a community have we fallen to the level of debating the importance of ethics that’s usually reserved for politicians, bankers, hedge fund managers, pimps, and bookies?
If you want to do good work, and I really hope you do, start doing it at your day job. Start asking questions about what you’re building. Start asking questions about who benefits from what you’re building. Start asking questions about who gets hurt by what you’re building. … if you’re not satisfied with their answers stop working. Designing something without understanding the ramifications of what it does is as unethical as designing something you know to be harmful.
But won’t somebody else make it? … yes. They might. … But here’s the thing. Just because the person next to you might be an asshole, that’s not a very good excuse for you to be one.