Curt Arledge writing in his company’s blog:
As our discourse about design ethics matures, we need better models for understanding this big, squishy subject so that we’re not talking about everything all at once. What does it really mean to be an ethical designer? What is most important, and what should we care about the most? What power do we really have to make a difference, and how should we use it?
Mr. Arledge offers a model that divides the areas of concerns in three layers:
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Interface
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Business
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Infrastructure
The stack goes from specific and concrete at the top to systemic and abstract at the bottom. This seems like a useful way of understanding the domain — and especially the parts where designers have the most influence on the problem.
That said, design work is medium-agnostic. There’s no reason why designers should constrain themselves to only the layers that have to do with the interface. There are many problems at the business and infrastructure layers that would be well-served by strategic design.
This is one of the central points in Living in Information, where I present a similar model. It’s encouraging to see other designers thinking along these lines.
