Ethics principles

Ethics principles

Below is a set of orienting principles, not rules, researched and developed by Lucy West since 2018. They are not universal truths. They exist as prompts for reflection, responsibility, and ethical action in context. Ethics lives in practice – in the messy, human space where judgement, intuition, and lived experience shape our decisions.

1. The Designer Is the Ethical Medium

Ethics does not live in frameworks, policies, or checklists, it lives in the designer.
Your values, background, power, incentives, and blind spots shape outcomes long before a product ships. Ethical practice begins with recognising yourself as part of the system you are designing.

Heuristic prompts
• How am I shaping this work,  consciously or not?
• What parts of myself are being amplified here? Which are being suppressed?

2. Ethics Are Situated, Not Universal

There is no single ethical position that fits all contexts.
Ethical decisions emerge from culture, power, history, and lived experience. What is ethical in one environment may be harmful in another. Attempts to universalise ethics often erase difference.

Heuristic prompts
• Whose values are centred? Whose are invisible?
• What assumptions am I importing into this context?

3. Reflection Is a Core Design Skill

Ethical designers cultivate reflective practice as deliberately as technical skill.
Reflection turns discomfort, frustration, and ethical tension into insight. Without reflection, ethics becomes performative or reactive rather than intentional.

Heuristic prompts
• What about this work is bothering me, and why?
• What pattern keeps repeating across projects?

4. Speculation Is an Ethical Tool

Speculative design is not aesthetic provocation, it is ethical rehearsal.
By imagining plausible, preferable, and undesirable futures, designers surface consequences before harm becomes real. Speculation allows ethics to be explored before they are locked into systems.

Heuristic prompts
• If this scales, who benefits? Who absorbs the cost?
• What future does this normalise?

5. Design Is World-Shaping, Not Neutral

Design does not merely respond to the world, it actively produces conditions for living.
Every artefact, service, or system shapes behaviour, relationships, and norms. Claiming neutrality is itself an ethical position, often one that deflects responsibility.

Heuristic prompts
• What ways of being does this design encourage?
• What behaviours does it quietly discourage or erase?/h5>

6. Responsibility Extends Beyond the Brief

Ethical responsibility does not end at scope, role, or contract.
Designers are accountable for foreseeable impacts, even when those impacts fall outside delivery milestones, KPIs, or job descriptions.

Heuristic prompts
• What am I choosing not to question because it’s “not my job”?
• What harm is predictable, even if unintended?

7. Integrity Over Convenience

Ethical action often conflicts with speed, profit, or organisational comfort.
Choosing integrity may mean friction: slowing down, pushing back, naming misalignment, or accepting personal risk. Ethical practice is not always rewarded, but it is always consequential.

Heuristic prompts
• What is the easier choice here and why?
• What would alignment with my values require instead?

8. Power Must Be Acknowledged Explicitly

Designers operate within and reinforce power structures.
Ethical practice requires recognising where power sits: who decides, who profits, who is exposed to risk, and who has no meaningful voice.

Heuristic prompts
• Who has agency in this system? Who does not?
• Where am I complicit in reinforcing imbalance?

9. Ethics Is Ongoing, Not Resolved

Ethics is not something you “get right” once.
As contexts shift, technologies evolve, and personal values change, ethical practice must remain adaptive, experimental, and unfinished.

Heuristic prompts
• What have I learned since the last time I faced this dilemma?
• What would I do differently now?

10. Design Is a Practice of Becoming

Ethical design is less about outcomes and more about who you are becoming through practice.
Design can challenge certainty, expose assumptions, and demand growth if you allow it to. Letting go of what you think you know is itself an ethical act.

Heuristic prompts
• What is this work asking me to unlearn?
• Who am I becoming as a designer through this choice?

Read:

Design ethics for designers who give a toss

Read:

Ethical tensions in design practice