Rethinking Design: On Ethics

In these four volumes, leading design thinker Clive Dilnot addresses central issues for our understanding of design and its place in the world. The individual volumes deal respectively with history, configuration, ethics and knowledge.

In On Ethics, Dilnot returns to a long-standing concern with the relationship and responsibilities of design and ethics, reassessing his earlier writings in the field and extending them in response to recent work in anthropology and economics. Dilnot considers the gift economy and variants of 'slow' or no-growth qualitative economics, the question of capabilities and philosophy, especially on the relation of ethics and politics and on questions of justice. Dilnot asserts that the question of ethics is precisely a question of design, linking this directly to the question of how we can act well in the world-as-artificial. Dilnot argues for a conceptualisation of design beyond its transitional professional boundaries, to be thought of as a mode of acting in the world.

This is an important update of one of Dilnot's seminal theoretical works, and it should be of interest to all design scholars and practitioners.