This industry perspective is by Nien Siao, Dean of the JS Institute of Design.
Aristotle famously said that “educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” This quote captures a dilemma at the core of modern design. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we build and experience the world. This unprecedented technology has led design educators to contemplate how urgently and thoroughly they can integrate ethics into design curricula.
While ethical design may sound like a straightforward concept, we often overlook its real-world implications. With our shifting cultural ideals and demographics, the consequences of our design choices have grown more complex, more debatable and more controversial. The influence of design has grown beyond style and usability, as decisions made in design today reflect one’s values, political beliefs, social involvement and sway influence across the world.
Designers now create for a world where tools, technology and means are evolving faster than values can keep pace. We often experience search results that are biased or amplify disinformation, or a search engine recommends user decisions without revealing the underlying influence. However, in many design classrooms, ethics is still treated as a peripheral subject—if addressed at all.
Ethics in design means thinking critically about how a product affects people, not just whether it functions well. It means asking questions: Who gains? Who is left out? What happens at scale, over time? These questions are existing operational concerns. The designer’s intentions may fall short of outcomes if these aspects are not thoroughly considered.
While ethical design may sound like a straightforward concept, we often overlook its real-world implications.
The following ideals should translate directly into everyday decisions made by designers.
User-Centered Design
Design, at its core, begins with usability—how quickly a new user can find their footing, how fluid the experience becomes over time, and how well users recover from mistakes. These metrics are not only guidelines but also set a working brief for the designer. Users returning to the design experience should feel a sense of familiarity, trust, and continual improvement.
Longevity of Design
Design must also be able to hold up under scrutiny. Short-term gains are often prioritized over long-term impact. This practice, most notable in the rise of disposable hardware such as sleek devices, which are unrepairable by design, is a form of planned obsolescence. These design decisions, based on commercial constraints, result in landfills and ultimately cost future generations. The inclusion of sustainability is often an indispensable criterion of good design.
Inclusive Design
Accessibility is a critical concern in design. A design needs to be usable for someone with impaired vision, limited dexterity, or cognitive differences. Over one billion people worldwide live with a disability; thus, accessibility audits and inclusivity testing must be part of the brief.
Transparency in Design
Transparency is no longer a design feature but a right. Internet users today are subjected to tracking, personalization, and automated decision-making, often without their complete awareness. The onus to disclose vital information falls upon the designer, while users are more likely to thoughtfully engage with something if they understand how and why something works.
Involvement in Design
Great design emerges from listening to users, critics, and stakeholders affected by the design. Participation of the full spectrum of stakeholders in the process, such as feedback, etc., contributes to increased innovation and higher user satisfaction.
AI-Powered Design
Artificial intelligence has added to the urgency in the complex process of design development and its use. Designers are shaping these systems through their frameworks. Every AI-powered interface is a sequence of choices, such as which questions to ask, what defaults to set, and what outcomes to reward. If ethical review is not built into this process, there is a high possibility of significant harm.
Design Education is Starting to Take Notice
Design schools are beginning to take note of the influences and impact of ethics and AI in education. At Carnegie Mellon, the Responsible AI initiative integrates ethics into design and engineering courses at all levels. The Royal College of Art in London has introduced cross-disciplinary studios where students are required to defend their AI-integrated designs before panels of sociologists and policy scholars. Earlier seen as thought experiments, such curricular shifts acknowledge that without ethics, we are training toolmakers instead of designers.
Whether we build tools for convenience or control, the values rooted in them (or lack thereof) will carry forward. A 2020 audit of Google’s ad delivery algorithms found that women were less likely to be shown ads of high-paying jobs than men. It was the result of engagement-based optimization, where the algorithm showed ads that users had previously clicked more often. The designers did not write discriminatory code; they enabled a discriminatory outcome by failing to interrogate the mechanism.
In Singapore, the Design Singapore Council launched the National Design Project in 2023. It is a framework that mandates all public-sector digital products to undergo review for accessibility and ethical impact. Each team must include a design lead trained in both systems thinking and stakeholder accountability. Preliminary results show a 27% increase in user satisfaction across key services. This improvement is not a coincidence. This is design with foresight.
Design has evolved from decoration to direction, and design education must reflect that.
We are not substantiating the curriculum when we talk of ethics in design. Instead, we are building the kind of society we want to live in. To design is to decide, and to educate young designers well is to ensure they know that every decision leaves a mark.
Nien Siao is Dean of the JS Institute of Design, with over 30 years of experience in design education and practice. She has held leadership positions at prestigious institutions like Pearl Academy and IILM University. Her expertise spans design academics, business strategy, and design management. As a design practitioner, she has worked extensively in various domains, including fashion, textiles, and crafts. She actively contributes to design education, serving as an advisor to universities across India.
Header image by Getty Images for Unsplash+.
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