Moral Design — Journey Group

The pursuit of moral design asks us to cultivate at least three things within ourselves and our practices:

1. true affection , rooted in respect, experience, and specific knowledge;


2. empathetic boldness to confront deep-rooted, complex failures in other designers’ work; and


3. genuine humility in an industry that seems to celebrate hubris and seeing wha

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only sustainable medium for morality is affection—and moreover, he introduces a language for affection that is informed, practical, and practiced.

Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.

designers ought to be the loudest and most insistent proponents for discovering new and better ways to produce goods and services

vernacular design, which I would define as functional design for ordinary people rooted in a local economy and culture.

The democratization of process and proliferation of tools enable hundreds of small, local design decisions to have an immediate and outsized impact. When something works in one place, it can be quickly copied, tailored, and applied in other contexts.

A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

— Attributed to Albert Einstein

the people best equipped to solve any given problem in a durable way are those most familiar with the full complexity of the problem

To design is to make decisions for others. Because it involves an exchange of power, however slight, design is best understood as a moral pursuit.