The Fifth Dialogue on Articulating Justice in Design
In this dialogue Practitioner and Scholar develop heuristics for justice in design, leaning on the capability approach. They hesitate to simplify the capability approach to a set of simple principles, but decide to take the chance because the gains of being able to share ethical assumptions outweigh the dangers of misinterpreting the capability approach. They regard transparency in design assumptions as vital for justice. Then they choose a student project, Transfer Ticket, a client transfer concept for psychiatric health care, as an example to test the heuristics.
They discuss the common objective of design and the capability approach to turn resources into achievements. They speak about the nature of ethical problems, design problems, and ill-defined problems, and about comparative justice. They address design that provides people with roles that make them “flourishing hybrids,” elaborate on the problem of design being paternalistic, and the positive freedoms designers allow their clients and vice versa. They take the stand that, from the point of view of justice, design for wellbeing can sometimes be a less desirable goal than design that compromises subjective wellbeing. They identify a need for a comprehensive approach for modesty, even asceticism, and compromises in wellbeing. Then they address the problem of prioritizing resources between design projects and the objectives of design, but find no ethical rules that would make it easier for designers to make decisions on this issue. Adding justice into the problem space of design does not make it less complicated.
They conclude by agreeing that they cleared ample room for the evaluation of just designs. Practitioner summarizes by saying that designers meet their ethical responsibility when they honestly articulate the ethical aims of their work.
The dialogue begins …
S: Hi, Practitioner. You’re back with new questions.
P: I think I have something in mind.
S: Tell me.
P: Last time … no, the time before that, we talked about the capability approach and usability.
S: Yes.
P: But we didn’t link the capability approach directly to designers’ ways of working.
S: Well, not directly. We spoke about usability.
P: I think that the capability approach could help designers work towards and articulate the justice of their work without us having to employ usability as a mediating concept. I think it’s a detour on our way to getting to what we actually want to understand. Do you agree?
S: We were able to say something relevant about the quality of use. We had to change the content and the name of usability to make it suit our purposes, but the original idea still looms in the background. Using a framework of justice “directly” to help designers in making just choices might be difficult. Well, Bentham presented something applicable, as we discussed last time, but there are issues. I mean, do you think designers could use the capability approach without a mediating framework? We need something that’s easier to digest than the capability approach and also more operational and familiar. I don’t mean that it’s especially cryptic, but it isn’t a cookbook either. Sen is a man of many words and there are plenty of others who have their opinions about the capability approach.
P: I think it’s a promising framework. I didn’t think about what would be the best way to learn to apply it.
S: Designers’ capability to apply Sen’s philosophy for the development of a just society might be limited owing to individual and cultural conversion factors. At the very least, the capability approach needs to be made attainable for us and compatible with our processes. It needs to be understandable without being paternalistic. The conceptualizations of ethics and justice need to be comprehensible, relevant for design, and applicable in practice. Simply put, I think the approach should be made easier to digest and use. And based on our earlier discussions, there’s one thing we’ve learned, if nothing else: wherever and however we try to look for and formulate simple claims about responsible design and design for justice and wellbeing, we end up noticing that everything is dependent on something.
P: Maybe that’s been the case because of our reluctance to speak about anything focused and particular.
S: It may also be due to the types of questions we’re dealing with. What is the unit of just distribution, what is the principle of distribution, how to define what is enough, which are the just exceptions of equality? And so on. There’s always another way to think about these. If it seems that there isn’t, we soon notice that we’ve been building on hidden assumptions. So it’s not easy to make ethical deliberation easy—in fact, making it look easy when it’s not would be dishonest.
P: I’ve realized that, but considering an issue from another perspective and questioning the assumptions is a way to learn.
S: True. It’s a route to learning. Those who ponder the simple principles and heuristics become aware of what they’re good for and what they’re not. They know the assumptions, at least to a certain level, but we face problems if we want to provide designers with easy-to-apply heuristics to be used without deliberation. The capability approach underlines certain issues, but saying that it’s a collection of few claims wouldn’t do justice to Sen and others.
P: But maybe we could discuss whether we can formulate some rules of thumb. If we succeed, we could say that the rules are not crystallizations or summaries, but heuristics that link ethically relevant issues of design to more conceptual discussions about justice under the capability umbrella. We wouldn’t skip over deeper ethical elaboration; what I mean is, we wouldn’t claim that designers should be the only ones who are responsible. The rules of thumb would allow others to also participate in ethical scrutiny in the design field.
S: We can give this a try. We need links, bridges, conductors, or conceptual middleware linking the insights of the capability approach with design exploration.1 But before we start, we should decide how we could determine whether the conductors we propose are good or appropriate.
P: Telling designers what kinds of solutions they should be designing would probably be too much to ask.
S: Do you think it would be enough if we learn to ask constructive questions?
P: Designers are capable of asking plenty of questions without any checklists, but a checklist can serve as a reminder. The capability connection provides conceptual assets for deeper analysis and linking the discussion on design ethics to broader principles of justice and wellbeing.
S: Do you think designers would think about these deeper issues?
We have to make our choices transparent and help stakeholders to take ethical stands and be critical.
P: Many wouldn’t. Most of us are rather pragmatic. However, if we use ethical claims to ensure that our design choices are just, linking those claims to broader frameworks would make it possible for others to talk about our work. Think about some of the issues we have an influence on, like privacy and freedom of choice, especially by designing service systems and infrastructures. We have a responsibility to make our choices transparent and actively help stakeholders to take ethical stands and be critical. If we use structured and clear language, we create a platform for this discussion. This is comparable to us using visualizations to make our solutions open to criticism. We need to do the same with our ethical justifications. The language would serve as a link, which designers would interpret by elaborating a design solution, while others who are more familiar with social justice would interpret it through their more conceptual insights or practical experience as well. This would create a system of design ethics where design is linked to domain expertise and expertise in ethics and distributional justice.
S: Is it really as simple as that?
P: We’re used to going up to an engineer to ask if our design can be built. We’re used to asking a marketing person if our design would sell.
S: We’re not as humble as that.
P: True, but basically we know who to talk to about these questions and what types of topics to address and how to express ourselves. But we don’t know what to address when we’re struggling with the justice of design. The link that we can identify will of course be sketchy and require plenty of interpretation. We cannot give anybody the impression that there are short cuts for just designs or that we believe there are. The capability framework supports the generation of evaluative angles and questions for design but doesn’t determine the solutions for designers. And I believe that the questions we come up with should be generic enough to be meaningful also for those who aren’t specialists in the capability approach.
S: You seem to be quite convinced. How do you think we should proceed?
P: Let’s work with a design case. Thus far we haven’t focused on a specific design project. Although we discussed many of the principles of the capability approach last time, maybe we need to revisit them a bit—examining them in the context of a specific case would give us a new angle.
S: Makes sense.
P: We could choose one of your student projects.
S: Why not. A design that might work well is a project that was completed some time ago called Transfer Ticket.2 Transfer Ticket was designed during a course where I gave a group of students an open-ended assignment to identify and develop opportunities for design to improve public psychiatric care. The students followed a loosely framed human-centered design process, including dialogues at a psychiatric ward, an outpatient clinic, and voluntary support organizations, and with psychiatrists, nurses, and ex-patients. They also drew from their own values, experiences, and insights. Several teams worked in parallel, but I suggest that we focus only on one. This team noticed that in the complicated system of psychiatric care, the transfer of patients between care-giving units was among the most critical phases of the care. Transfers made the patients feel insecure owing to their fear of being abandoned and the severing of relationships with care personnel. The students decided to develop a solution that would reassure the patients that their care was continuing, underline the long-term nature of the rehabilitation process, and fight against the stigma of mental disorders by interpreting care in a positive light. The solution was to apply a train or flight ticket metaphor for the referrals. At a practical level, Transfer Ticket is a paper slip that specifies the time and location of the next appointment. In terms of its meanings, the innovation was that it turned the care into a journey and the patient into a passenger. The concept was communicated with well-crafted ticket designs that worked as credible service evidence.
P: This case really deals with fundamental needs. It belongs to any list of responsible design topics. I believe a clear example helps us to elaborate the questions. So let’s use Transfer Ticket as our vehicle.
Division of labor to ensure justice
S: Good. How shall we start?
P: The main function of Transfer Ticket seems to me to be its bridging function. It ensures that the care resources that are in principle available to patients are actually attainable—if I got it correctly.
P: The concept of capability bridges individuals’ internal resources, external provisioning of resources, and the opportunities and constraints of the environment that enable people to choose what they prefer and to function in such a way that they achieve it. If resources are divided equally or at least everyone gets a decent share, the society and the trajectory of development are just. The bridging of human value and technical means is also a key mission of design. It should be fair to criticize the justice of our work based on how well and honestly we respond to that challenge.
S: The key phrase in the definition of industrial design by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID n.d.) expresses this by saying that design is about “innovative humanisation of technology.” That is a clear mission. But there are branches of design that are less technology- and research-driven than industrial and interaction design.
P: They can be seen as aiming to make cultural resources—seen traditionally as art, and for instance humanistic ideas and values—a part of everybody’s every day.
S: This would be close to the old idea of understanding design as applied art that only interprets cultural capital for everyday purposes. I don’t really like that. We want to create new value ourselves.
P: I think that here the discussion deals with whether our practice should only build bridges or also lay foundations for their abutments. By the latter metaphor I mean that designers would participate in the creation of the means that satisfy needs in addition to bridging the means with user need satisfaction. In any case, bridging is included in our mission. It’s important for us and I believe that including the bridging function as an ethical agenda for design is acceptable to us.
S: Capability is merely the unit of justice. Resources must be distributed in a way that is just.
Does design bridge resources to preferred attainments?
P: True, but to be able to distribute capabilities in a just way, we need to master the bridging function. Designers must have the interest and ability to build bridges between commodities and people—that is a prerequisite for ensuring just distribution. I think that it’s of fundamental importance for designers to ask the question, “Does design bridge resources to preferred attainments?” In fact, designers already frequently ask that question. The capability approach links it to ethical discourse. But shall we get back to Transfer Ticket?
S: Sure.
P: Would asking that question help in elaborating the ethics of Transfer Ticket or is it too obvious?
S: A fundamental criterion of justice for Transfer Ticket is its ability to make the provisioning of psychiatric care resources attainable for people who need them. The most valuable resource is the time and commitment of competent and motivated care personnel: the psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, therapists, and volunteers. Other resources include medication, premises, and other non-human resources. Because the clients suffer from mental disorders, their capability of making well-informed rational decisions is decreased. A significant problem in psychiatric care is clients who drop out of the therapy plan. They don’t show up for their appointments and quit taking their medication. Thus, the healthcare system, and design as a part of it, should perhaps take a stronger role in bridging the resources and individuals’ wellbeing. The Ticket itself isn’t in any substantial sense a resource, but quite literally a bridging instrument. It doesn’t influence the care as such, but for the clients it represents the availability of care in a certain location and at a certain point in time in the future. It’s a means to support people with decreased motivation and capability to imagine the continuation of the care and to hold on to their meaningful life projects and to persist with treatment that will help them towards a better condition and worthwhile life.
P: The capabilities that the Ticket enhances, if we choose from Martha Nussbaum’s (2011: 33–4) list of central capabilities, are “practical reason,” “affiliation,” and maybe some others too. Practical reason refers to an individual “being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflections about the planning of one’s life,” and affiliation refers to “having social bases of self-respect and nonhumiliation.”3 Nussbaum considers practical reason and affiliation to have special importance among the capabilities, as they enable individuals to plan their life and organize the ways they develop other capabilities and the social support for these. Without mental health, one doesn’t have practical reason, social dialogue, meaningful life projects, or self-respect—and thus nothing much else, either.
S: But mental health is not a central capability on Nussbaum’s list?
P: Nussbaum doesn’t mention it as such. Or maybe it’s there. She (2011: 33) mentions “bodily health” as a central capability, but doesn’t expound on what that includes. It would be natural to include mental health, but “practical reason” and “affiliation” already cover much of what belongs to mental health and are the foundation for everything else that is valuable in life.
S: Thanks.
P: An essential ethical concern with Transfer Ticket seems to be to what extent it should force the clients to complete their treatment.
S: The bridging metaphor and the capability approach underline freedom of choice and suggest that the bridge is there for the individuals to cross, but it’s up to them whether to stay or go.
P: That’s compatible with the non-paternalistic emphasis of the capability approach.
S: With Transfer Ticket we cannot trust patients to make rational decisions. The extremes in what can be done range from sending a police van to fetch patients to forced therapy to allowing people the freedom to head down a self-destructive path without intervening. Transfer Ticket aims at bridging the care resource to individuals’ wellbeing by adopting a persuasive strategy combining a positive metaphor with the practical benefits of delivering information. I think Transfer Ticket is successful in addressing this issue.
P: Travelling requires more than a ticket. You need to understand the schedules, get to the station, know what you need to pack, overcome your fears of going into unknown places. The Ticket serves as a reminder, gives information, and confirms the availability of care, but there are still obstacles—or conversion factors as they are called in the capability approach.
S: Yes. I think the metaphor can be extended to address many of those.
P: We can also see the Ticket as a resource that the patients need to be able to use, though you said it wouldn’t be a resource of care.
S: What kind of resource?
P: It’s an element of service and information design and it needs to be usable. If you cannot see the print, cannot read, you tend to forget and lose things and so on, you might not be capable of understanding and using the Ticket. So the Ticket needs to build on the patients’ capability “to use senses, to imagine, think, and reason” (Nussbaum 2011: 33).
S: Good point. Transfer Ticket is a resource, a bridging instrument, and perhaps we can even see it as a part of a service experience. In all of these roles we can and should ask the question about bridging resources to wellbeing.
P: The question might be somewhat self-evident.
S: We agreed it helps us to identify and raise concerns.
P: True.
S: But I want to come back to the issue of distribution. The questions we asked about Transfer Ticket are good, but how do we know if it does its job well enough for a particular patient? It’s not enough for design to work on a relevant dimension of justice if it’s not applied to improve just distribution and to give individuals capabilities that exceed the threshold of what is good enough. But how much is enough? How good does the design need to be? These questions are relevant for us, because we have pressures to design affordable solutions, but if we go below the threshold we end up violating our users’ wellbeing in an unjust manner. Designers who are involved in implementing real-world solutions shouldn’t make mistakes. Not big mistakes anyway. With vulnerable users, as is the case with Transfer Ticket, even small mistakes might turn into big problems.
P: The capability approach gives no clear answer. We should basically address capabilities for the sufficient wellbeing of all. However, wellbeing is neither a clearly subjective nor objective concept but somehow oscillates in between. Subjective aspirations for wellbeing are a challenging standard for the quality of design (Pogge 2003). “Passing an ample threshold” is Nussbaum’s (2011: 36–41) answer. She also says that equality isn’t required for material possessions as long as the minimal requirement for human dignity has been fulfilled.
S: This requires more elaboration.
P: Yes.
S: If we look outside of the capability discussion, I find Len Doyal and Ian Gough’s (1991: 161–4) threshold principle illuminating. They say that basic human needs should be satisfied optimally. These only include health and autonomy. Then there are numerous satisfiers, or intermediate needs as they call them, that are necessary for the basic needs to be satisfied. They include things such as “adequate protective housing” or “a non-hazardous physical environment.” These are the things that we can design, or try to at least. The interesting insight is that the intermediate needs don’t need to be optimally satisfied for the optimal satisfaction of the basic needs. The satisfaction of intermediate needs beyond the level where they satisfy maximally the basic needs is no longer normative.
P: Can you clarify?
S: For the basic need of health to be satisfied, one needs proper hygiene, housing with decent protection against the weather, and some other features. A reasonably moderate solution already optimally satisfies the basic need. That would mean in the case of Transfer Ticket that the service design doesn’t need to be optimized beyond what suffices to ensure that the patients recover and remain healthy.
P: That’s a lot already.
S: True. Actually, for Transfer Ticket it’s probably enough that they stick to the therapy plan provided. The service is instrumental for health and there’s no moral obligation to improve the design beyond the level required to keep the patients on board.
P: Doyal and Gough do not speak about capabilities.4
S: They don’t. That was a sidetrack. They speak about need satisfaction. But I don’t see needs and capabilities as being really that incompatible. A fundamental human need is a condition in which an individual doesn’t have sufficient levels of essential capabilities. An essential capability is something that an individual needs for sufficient wellbeing and agency. Someone might say that users in need should get help, but from the design point of view providing the means to satisfy the need should be enough in most cases—maybe not all. For designers, users’ needs give a reason and an opportunity to design, and capabilities are what we should provide or support the users to develop.
P: You might be using the terms loosely.
S: Most likely. But perhaps the dilemma of defining what is good enough is also fundamental to design. Remember Rittel and Webber’s (1973) analysis of the wicked and ill-defined nature of design problems. One of their characteristics is that there’s no rule that indicates when the design is good enough and the work ready to be finished. I believe that even if we were able to define the threshold levels for essential capabilities, it is highly unlikely that we would be able to use these definitions directly to address designers’ specific challenges with particular products. For example, in the case of Transfer Ticket, what could a generic framework of justice say? The standard needs to be defined by paying attention to the local situation and local resources. Adding more elements into the design equation such as more structured scrutiny of design ethics wouldn’t simplify the ill-defined nature of design problems. On the contrary, it would probably make it more complex and decrease the likelihood of us finding simple rules to determine when we have reached our goals.
P: Sen (2009) says that the most important thing with a framework for distributional justice and wellbeing is to be able to make comparisons between available alternatives. Idealistic theories of optimal justice have little meaning in practical decision-making, because aiming for ideal solutions isn’t a viable option. We don’t necessarily need to know where the final goal is in order to be able to take the next few steps in a direction that seems better. That said, this strategy is not risk-free either, as we might be lost in a fog and end up climbing the slope of a shallow hill rather than a high mountain. However, usually the practical project constraints ensure that we won’t design solutions that are too good, and the threshold for good enough is that the new solution is better than its alternatives.
S: You’re probably right.
P: Let’s continue with the next topic. Maybe we can outline another heuristic.
S: Okay.
P: I’d like to look at the bridging theme from another perspective. In addition to linking means to ends, the capability approach links the human to the artificial. This is perhaps not the most essential aspect of capability fundamentals, but from the point of view of design it might be relevant.
S: Okay.
P: Human capabilities consist of individuals’ inherited, naturally acquired, and purposefully learned competences together with the opportunities provided by the environment (Nussbaum 2000, 2011, Robeyns 2005, Gasper 2007). I think that is compatible with the way designers think.
S: Or at least the way our thinking has been described.
P: Dependence on artifacts and patterns of use is an integral element of design. An artifact and hypothetical user activity are inseparable goals of design. We define the shape of objects, but the objects shape human behavior, abilities, and ways of being and appreciating the world. And there are many designers these days who couldn’t care less about objects but instead see socio-technical systems as the object of their design. So we might say that we design the world in terms of combined capabilities. Design and capabilities direct attention to the processes of human agents taking advantage of material and cultural resources, and the integration of the human and the artificial, artifacts and activities. We think that a bike rider, a reader, and someone who has a house to live in are more capable of living a worthwhile life and flourish than an individual without a bike, library access, and shelter. The ideas of user need satisfaction and desire gratification shift our attention from the products to the satisfied hybrids, and the goal of design becomes a hybrid: a satisfied bike rider instead of a bicycle.
S: Perhaps you’re projecting your own views onto the whole design community. I’m sure some designers think their job is only to design products, and some have also pointed out the problems involved in designing users.
Does design create agents who flourish?
P: I didn’t suggest we design users, but their behaviors. There is a difference. I’m fascinated by the idea that we design combinations having aspects of both the human and the artificial.
S: Or maybe you could say you’d like us to design roles in which the human and non-human merge and which people can choose to adopt if they so wish and when they so wish.
P: Thanks.
S: My pleasure.
P: But the ethical question raised by the capability angle is do these hybrids actually flourish? When we create an endless sequence of new kinds of artificially augmented agents, one ethical concern is whether design creates agents who flourish rather than ones who merely slip into another role and do things in a way that is different, but no better.
S: Does it?
P: Let’s elaborate on Transfer Ticket.
S: Sure. So Transfer Ticket shouldn’t be assessed only as an object. We need to pay attention to how well it builds on and expands users’ capabilities. We need to ask in which respects a ticket holder becomes a different and more capable individual. Its design draws from the practices of travel and reframes psychiatric care as a journey. A patient becomes a passenger. We can ask if a passenger can see the destination better and consider it more relevant and motivating than a mere patient, a non-passenger. Is a passenger more likely to stay onboard? Does the role of a passenger communicate the allocation of responsibilities in a way that gives a feeling of safety? Is a passenger’s role active enough to enable the individual to take the initiative and responsibility to continue with the care plan and work to recover her practical reason? Is the role of a passenger socially acceptable and does it help in creating support networks? Would the idea of being on a journey to mental health be something that would also change the way the roles of care personnel are perceived? There are many kinds of journeys and many kinds of passengers. Should the ticket design be more specific in identifying what kind of passengers the patients become or would it be better to leave that open and let them specify that for themselves? At the end of the day all these questions should deal with the psychiatric patients’ capabilities for practical reason, affiliation, and sense, imagination and thought, as we discussed, but here we’re addressing the capability differences between ordinary patients on the one hand and “passengers” on the other hand that is the role provided and enabled by the design. These are questions that we deal with all the time when we design, but seldom ask explicitly in this manner. And the way design changes and labels people is of utmost ethical relevance. We mustn’t create stigmas.
P: We shouldn’t make them passengers against their will, or should we? Would it also be paternalistic to make people healthy? Should one have the right to choose to be depressed?
S: I don’t know.
P: The capability approach aims at being a non-paternalistic and liberal approach to distributional justice and wellbeing where individuals’ agency to choose is a fundamental value. Thus the idea of us trying to avoid “designing people” and rather focusing on proposing roles should be compatible with the capability approach.
S: The problem we have with Transfer Ticket is that if the patients have their full capability for practical reason, we probably should respect their decisions to reject the care. But they don’t have this capability, so we need to consider taking paternalistic action. I say consider.
P: Maybe this is one of those cases where we can consider functioning instead of capability. Mental balance is so self-evidently good that we don’t need to consider the opposite as an option in the same vein as in the earlier-mentioned case of being free of domestic violence.
S: There are probably cases on the threshold where a unique personality starts to turn into a medical condition.
P: The relationship between subjective choice and objective decision-making isn’t clear. The capability approach takes a clear and design-relevant stand on the subjective–objective dilemma by respecting individuals’ process agency.5 Otherwise, the approach oscillates between subjective and objective priorities (Gasper 2007). Actually, Nussbaum (2010: 77) mentions that she shares Rawls’ (1971: 20) method of “reflective equilibrium” to balance between rules of justice and intuition. Rules represent an objective foundation for decisions, and intuition is the subjective feeling of justice in a particular situation. The ambivalence and dynamics between individuals’, a community’s, opinion leaders’, and experts’ opinions, their readings of a situation or reference to generic rules need to be accepted, interpreted, and applied to just design.
S: This ambivalence is a fundamental part of design. A framework that doesn’t tolerate the ambiguity between subjectivity and objectivity won’t be compatible with the reality of design. This being the case, we might have enough reason to sketch the next question.
P: Yes.
S: It should address individuals’ freedom of choice and just reason.
P: Speaking about freedom of choice and avoiding the paternalistic imposing of ideas makes me think about us and users as different kinds of moral agents.
S: What do you mean?
P: Users need to have liberty to choose and do things that we don’t necessarily appreciate.
S: Yes. Do you agree with that?
P: I do, but what about us? Aren’t we imposing a paternalistic agenda of social responsibility and ethical design onto our colleagues? Shouldn’t designers enjoy the same liberty as users to work on the life projects they find relevant and meaningful? Even if we consider those projects futile, the designers are nonetheless responsible on their own terms. Or maybe they enjoy the liberty of not being responsible as long as they aren’t openly and directly harming anyone. Or to present the dilemma in another way, I feel that we implicitly, and simply without further elaboration, consider users as people who make subjective decisions, and designers as people who should work as objective and responsible decision-makers. In Rawls’ terms, we put ourselves into the original position or somewhere halfway there. We are the ones to whom users’ needs are normative, even though the users don’t need to care. This puts us in an position where we have lot of ethical responsibility. Some of us may aspire to be in that position. There are many, I think, who would deserve to have that position, but only a few who actually can serve in that role. If we build our discussion on these assumptions—assumptions that designers have ethical superiority—we’re being unrealistic. Think about the opposite setting. Would it be fair to assume that users and customers avoid being paternalistic towards us? Would it be fair to expect that they allow us to do and be what we want, and that they have a responsibility to ensure that we enjoy all the central capabilities? Wouldn’t that be as reasonable a requirement as requiring designers to be moral actors?
S: How they influence our behavior and capabilities is a complex issue, but let’s take a simple example. A wealthy client is commissioning a designer to design her a holiday villa. She will be the future owner and user of the design. The designer or architect starts to work for her. We can assume that the client might not care about the designer’s capabilities, agency, and achievements. She might be paternalistic, pushing her own agenda that the designer has to accept—for instance, design in a rustic style—even if they couldn’t imagine anything worse. She’s the one paying for the project, so she’s entitled to do that. Furthermore, she might be difficult, refusing to provide other, non-monetary resources to the designer, such as information or time, and so on. Then we can imagine another client who respects the designer’s needs and wishes and nurtures her capabilities to be the kind of designer she wants to be. The client provides the designer with ample access to resources such as information, time, collegial support, and so on. The client doesn’t set conditions on the designer’s work apart from what is necessary and well justified. Once the villa has been built she takes care of it in a manner that respects the designer’s efforts. It’s clear that the designer’s needs, happiness, or capabilities, whichever we choose as our currency of justice, depend on the client’s behavior as a moral agent. The moral client should make an effort to ensure that the designer can do what a good designer should, but not demand that she do those things. These sound like very demanding requirements for the client, but if we think about a dream client whose behavior is instrumental for great design, that’s what is needed: freedom, support, and trust.
P: The second client helps the designer and design to flourish.
S: So the responsibilities could be seen to be reciprocal. Perhaps they really are.
P: In the case of Transfer Ticket, it doesn’t work like that.
S: The user and the client are not a single person, unlike in our simple case. The user includes sponsors, beneficiaries, operators, experiencers, neighbors, and appliers, as we specified, and the way the moral agency is split between them is a complicated question. The designers have been dependent on the sponsors, who are in a position to decide what the designers should do. However, the designers did interact with the beneficiaries, appliers, and experiences as well, and their respect for the designers’ preferred ways of working was instrumental for the designers’ capability. I believe that turning the idea of responsible and moral design on its head by considering responsible clients is a good way for us to understand the difference between what it takes to ensure minimal capabilities or to satisfy basic needs versus the work required to ensure that individuals can flourish. The client who makes design flourish is a moral agent and a good role model for us to think about in terms of our moral agency in helping users flourish.
P: You’re saying that our focus on designers’ ethics doesn’t mean that we consider ourselves morally superior.
S: Absolutely not.
P: Thanks for the clarification and sorry for the digression.
S: No problem.
P: Shall we return to the users’ freedoms? Can we simply ask whether the subjective and objective angles have been adequately considered in design? How about Transfer Ticket?
S: It aims to help people recover their capability to act as active and autonomous members of society. Being capable of doing things that make human life flourish is the objective of the capability approach and also the objective of mental healthcare. It’s also compatible with the long-term development of the mental healthcare system to reduce institutionalization and to build care on support and coping. This is understood to benefit both society and individuals. We save resources, as institutions don’t need to be maintained and patients don’t have to be institutionalized. Transfer Ticket supports this scenario. However, the patients’ subjective interpretations might be different. When you don’t have confidence that you’re in control of your life, especially after you’ve spent time in an institution, the prospect of taking an independent role and coping with everyday life can be a horrifying scenario. Consequently, we can and should ask would the Ticket and the design intentions driving it push the objective angle of independence too strongly? Would it encourage psychiatrists to issue Tickets prematurely? Should the ticketing system understand those who don’t want to travel and incorporate variation to better accommodate the needs of the patients? Is the Ticket an extension and a material interpretation of the objective conception of health? Is there anything in the design of the Ticket that allows the passengers to specify what being healthy means for them or choose to forgo treatment and endure their condition, if they have their own personal reason to do so?
P: Maybe there should be tickets for local rides for the insecure and intercity vouchers, as it were, for the more adventurous?
S: That would be a good idea. Psychiatric care is becoming increasingly collaborative, allowing the patients to have a say. Maybe they should also be able to issue tickets for themselves. More generally we can also ask how the responsibilities are allocated between the passenger and the “travel agency” both during the ticketing process and after the ticket has been issued so that the subjective and objective criteria for a good life meet?
P: For more capable passengers, the system could provide a portal where they can order their own tickets. This would give them more freedom in a supported manner. But now we’re only speculating. We’re not there yet.
S: That’s what design is all about. Actually, other students in my class proposed something like that.6 They designed sites allowing clients to monitor and adjust their care plans. But back to your comments: we’re interested in the justice of what could be.
P: The capability approach is similar. Capabilities built at a certain point in time may become desirable much later in life. This is especially true when we speak about intergenerational justice, which is a requirement for sustainable development. Education is also a prime example. Gaining capabilities now will allow a person to achieve something decades later. What kinds of things these capabilities will enable is extremely difficult to foresee. The value of a capability depends on many things, including whether others have it or not, coincidental factors, and the fact that having a certain capability will lead to different choices in life compared to not having that capability. When the value of a capability is evaluated today, say knowing a language, the evaluation cannot merely be based on the factual situation, but should also consider plausible future scenarios. Discussion of these properties has been somewhat lacking from the capability perspective (Teschl and Comim 2005, Binder and Witt 2012), but it’s clear that the process of capability development and utilization is emergent rather than determined.
S: Chris Jones (1970/1992: 4) defined design as initiating change in an artifact. We can perhaps say that if the change remains at the level of commodities, with no changes in capabilities, design isn’t influential or ethically relevant. Correspondingly, those frameworks that don’t stretch to the emergent and elusive future impacts of products and their use would be inadequate for the ethics of design. Design is based on the anticipation of the future, and design itself is an intentional tool to change the future. Much of human-centered design is about building scaffoldings to negotiate the perceptions of reasonably valued future functionings in a way that’s grounded on the prevailing reality with its conversion factors. In so doing, we’re not blinded by today’s adapted preferences when we’re envisioning what will be valuable in the future.
P: One of our questions should clearly point towards the emerging capabilities.
S: I guess that’s where we have arrived.
P: Shall we ask whether design can create sustaining and robust capabilities?
S: Yes. But that’s probably not enough. We should add the things that might be enabled by design.
P: Can design create sustaining and robust capabilities and create foundations for new ones to emerge?
S: That would be better.
Can design create sustaining and robust capabilities and foundations for new ones to emerge?
P: Can Transfer Ticket?
S: Transfer Ticket is not a radical innovation and could most likely be easily integrated into present psychiatric care. However, the longer-term effects are difficult to estimate. Design may start to change the practice, attitudes, and values around it. We should be able to estimate how the idea of a journey as a ubiquitous metaphor for rehabilitation would change the practice. How would it influence patients’ expectations? Would this new type of travel become too popular and crowd the clinics with wannabe passengers? Would the nurses feel intimidated if they were to be considered “ticket inspectors”? How would they actually be seen? Being high on drugs is called a trip, and as medication has an important role in psychiatric care, this might create an unwanted connotation. Would the role of a passenger become a new kind of stigma combining the negative associations of mental disorders, drug abuse, and the state of being somewhere in between? And would it encourage patients to act accordingly? Would the idea of a journey turn into endless commuting?
P: There are several ways in which things can go wrong.
S: Obviously.
P: Perhaps we could formulate it in another way and ask if the designers have taken every reasonable step to foresee the emerging consequences.
S: A third way to ask the question can be drawn from our earlier discussion about practices and the ways the value of practice can and should be regarded as a criterion of the quality of use. Perhaps we could ask if design increases the value of the practice.
P: That’s a good question but I don’t think it refers exactly to the same issues as my way of posing the question. And linking it to capabilities would require a few extra steps. Do we need to choose?
S: No. We’re just discussing.
P: Good. In our previous discussion, we mentioned the idea of people choosing to suffer. Can we get back to that? I think it’s kind of related to what we’ve been addressing.
S: Sure.
P: Capabilities deal with individuals’ wellbeing or sacrificing it for a good cause. Sen’s (1993, 2000, 2010a) fundamental assumption is that happiness is not the ultimate goal. Consequently, wellbeing alone shouldn’t be the unit to evaluate justice. From time to time, people voluntarily compromise their wellbeing for the benefit of others. Suffering for a relevant reason and having the option to do so is a gain.
S: “Suffering” is a strong word.
P: “Compromising” would be a milder term.
S: Design tends to cater to selfishness. We don’t design in order to compromise wellbeing. I can, of course, use my broom to sweep my neighbor’s porch. However, the idea of voluntarily withdrawing from wellbeing as a fundamental aspect of design wouldn’t be widely supported. Design focuses on generating capabilities for personal wellbeing, and when altruistic choices would be desirable they tend to be framed as wellbeing achievements.
P: I think this is a trickier issue. There are quite a few different angles in design that in one way or another address individuals’ goals and behaviors, which are not motivated by subjective wellbeing. We can think about several product categories that are designed to benefit people other than the user. Just think about medical equipment and teaching materials. These are used to help others to achieve something. However, the users—whether they are doctors, nurses, teachers, bus drivers, waiters, hair stylists, or any layperson—aren’t typically considered to sacrifice their wellbeing for other purposes. They work or sometimes volunteer for the benefit of others while getting something for themselves, too, such as material compensations, mental satisfaction, or hopefully both. So typically we don’t think of them as sacrificing anything in a way that would be different from working for their own wellbeing. But obviously we could. By designing products for these purposes we could perhaps be seen to be persuading people to engage in altruistic activity. Design would create some sorts of “cushioned” or “softened” sufferings or sacrifices. We would encourage people to sacrifice their wellbeing by providing wellbeing.
S: Ultimately, this suffering might turn into pleasure. Would that kind of design destroy the possibility for something that the capability approach considers important?
P: I don’t think the capability approach considers suffering as a value as such, but instead as an effect that people should be able to choose, accept, and tolerate if there is a reason for doing so.
S: Makes sense. But that isn’t yet an answer to the question of design that compromises one’s wellbeing.
P: No, it’s not.
S: Actually, we can see the use of any tool as suffering. That’s the basic assumption in traditional ergonomics and the standpoint of our operator. Working and using tools involve effort and are thus considered as requiring the worker to compromise her wellbeing. The task of a designer is to make the suffering more tolerable by giving the tool an appropriate shape. If the shape motivates someone to work, the design has succeeded in persuading her to compromise her wellbeing for a cause that is as good as the objectives of her work.
P: We already discussed usability and conviction-critical use.
S: We did.
P: Let’s not go back there.
S: But there’s one more thing that we should remember when we speak about design that compromises one’s wellbeing. Conspicuous consumption (Veblen 1899/2003) creates inequality in society. Something that may be good for one person might in fact have bad consequences for everyone. If a job applicant wears an expensive suit for an interview, that would give him an advantage (Frank 1999). Because all the applicants are serious about getting a job, the next time there’s a job opening, all of them know they need to be dressed up and everyone has to buy a suit. No one derives any more benefits from the suit, but everyone had to spend more money than would’ve been necessary. Situations such as these, in which individual and common interests are in conflict and result in losses for everyone in all sectors of life, create a massive loss of happiness. The experience of wellbeing is relative and others’ choices and possessions set the reference and target level for our consumption. Some don’t achieve the target. Some do, but have to compromise much of what is necessary for genuine happiness.
P: Which is?
S: Family, reasonable income, meaningful work, community and friends, health, freedom, and personal values such as religion (Layard 2005: 62–73).7
P: Okay.
S: Many cannot keep up with rising standards of consumption and start feeling isolated and worthless. They work for secondary goals and ignore their families, what is meaningful at work, and so on. Thus, the consumption rat race increases inequality and compromises happiness and wellbeing. To avoid this, we should develop designs that encourage people to make modest choices. A modest choice is a choice that compromises personal utility for a greater good.
P: Sustainable design deals with modesty of consumption.
S: True. But even sustainable design often lacks faith in consumers’ willingness to compromise their wellbeing, and speaks about responsible choices disguised as pleasures (Jordan 2002; Chapman 2005; Niinimäki 2011). The point we could perhaps raise is that there are plenty of ways in which design could nudge individuals to compromise their wellbeing for a greater good. We design for wellbeing, but we should also design for compromised wellbeing for the greater good.
P: I think we do that.
We design for wellbeing while we should design for compromised wellbeing for the greater good.
S: We need to pursue this more seriously. The topics would probably include persuasion to engage consumers in altruistic behaviors, cushioned suffering, making consumers face the naked consequences of any socially or environmentally questionable choices they make, better communicating the value of moderate choices, making asceticism cool, and so on. I don’t say these questions wouldn’t have been addressed, but I think that a more coherent framework is missing that would challenge subjective wellbeing and pleasure. They dominate over altruistic design. Human-centered design theory is underdeveloped when it comes to understanding design that doesn’t aim at subjective pleasure.
P: Capability and probably any ethical theory could help. Whether design increases the capability to compromise subjective wellbeing is a seldom asked but obvious question in the evaluation of design. Perhaps another way to word the question is to ask whether design compromises someone’s interests directly or indirectly.
S: That comes close to the Bruntland Commission’s definition of sustainable development (United Nations Documents 1987).
P: It’s not very different from the neighbor’s standpoint we talked about the other day, either.
S: True.
P: What about Transfer Ticket and compromised wellbeing?
S: Psychiatric patients are in a situation where they need to work for their own wellbeing before they can achieve a life balance that allows them to start supporting others.
P: Peer support can be important.
S: Yes, you’re right. That might be another line of scrutiny. However, what I had in mind is that Transfer Ticket, like other solutions in psychiatric care, needs to be evaluated by paying attention to the roles the solutions have in the ecosystem of care involving several stakeholders. An essential condition for rehabilitation is a social support network. Thus when we evaluate Transfer Ticket we need to ask what kind of access to rehabilitation it gives to different stakeholders. How does it communicate the need to compromise one’s wellbeing for the more relevant cause of supporting people with mental disorders? Does it guide the helpers to adopt a meaningful role as fellow passengers and underline the urgency and relevance of this role? Is it a desperate cry for help, ignoring which makes the neighbors uncomfortable, or an invitation to go on a rewarding journey? Is it an instrument that has the potential to strengthen social responsibility in general? Does it welcome ex-patients to continue the ride and share their experiences for the benefit of those in acute crisis?
P: We’re speaking about the capability of affiliation (Nussbaum 2011: 34–9).
S: Yes. Perhaps we could also ask if Transfer Ticket succeeds in communicating to the patient that her condition is a common interest to all and not just her own private problem. There are others who care and others who benefit from her recovery. I mean that persons with low self-esteem might be encouraged if they realize that by helping themselves they help others.
P: I don’t know if you’re overly confident that Transfer Ticket is the solution to all of this, but the questions are good, anyway. I agree with them.
S: Shall we move on to the next topic?
P: Sure.
S: Do you think the capability approach can give us advice on whether it’s appropriate to use resources in developing Transfer Ticket? The dilemma is, of course, that there are other good purposes as well and our resources are limited.
P: The capability approach is fundamentally against reducing wellbeing into a single variable such as happiness or subjective wellbeing—or gross domestic product. The quality of life is more complicated and consists of a higher amount of valuable elements of different types than something that can be described by either economical generalizations or a single indicator of individual happiness. Nussbaum (2011) suggests that each individual should be provided with all of the capabilities on her list of central capabilities. Sen (2010a: 239–41) also says that capabilities are non-commensurable. An individual’s capability of achieving a certain valuable goal cannot be accepted as a reason for ignoring her right to be capable of achieving another goal, if both of these are valuable aspects of human life.
S: Everything cannot always be achieved and choices need to be made.
P: Sen says there is no calculus or terminal criteria for trade-offs, but the decisions involve real choices about what is valuable and necessary.
S: Don’t you think that some capabilities are more important?
P: While on the one hand capabilities are non-commensurable, on the other hand they are instrumental for other capabilities and thus linked. For instance, physical mobility is valuable per se and cannot be traded off for other capabilities, but at the same time it contributes to maintaining social relationships, getting physical exercise for health, and being able to work for income, and many other things. “Fertile functionings” is a term used in referring to capabilities that are instrumental in achieving several other capabilities, while “corrosive disadvantages” are factors that increase other disadvantages (Wolff and De-Shalit 2007). Consequently, capabilities should be considered as both mutually instrumental and independent dimensions of wellbeing and justice. So the answer is that basically no relevant element of human dignity has priority over others, but when we need to prioritize we should perhaps pay attention to fertile functionings and corrosive disadvantages. But formulating a heuristic or question about this is difficult, because whatever we say about two conflicting capabilities would violate the non-commensurability principle.
S: That’s only part of the answer.
P: Anything I can say is.
S: Sorry, didn’t mean to criticize.
P: Please do.
S: Well …
P: But I thought a product is often part of a more complicated network, rather than simply being one product that improves one capability. Assistive devices for the disabled help in enhancing mobility, but may be experienced as stigmatizing and have a negative impact on self-esteem and social relationships. The use of information technology can be beneficial in many respects, but excessive use can lead to alienation from the physical and social world. Products have side effects that influence capabilities in unintended ways. So when we give priorities to design projects from the point of view of justice and wellbeing, we should be able to say which are the most important capabilities and then we should understand which capabilities certain products have an influence on. Identifying these impacts and side effects in advance is already a problem—and once they are found, there is no procedure to calculate a trade-off that could be used to avoid making ethical decisions.
Do you think this is the fundamental problem that we’ve been struggling with in all of our discussions?
S: Which problem?
P: I mean the problem of the lack of rules and the requirement of making decisions without firm justifications.
S: In design, the questions and answers, premises and solutions, inputs and outcomes are intertwined. Paying more attention to designers’ responsibility and ethics doesn’t make design simpler.8 So, taking real decisions on issues with non-commensurable alternative solutions, as Sen requires us to do, is in a way what we’re used to. Our search for the foundations of responsible design has to account for that. Of course we can’t accept that anything goes, but we struggle against and push the boundaries to try to find solid ground on which we can build our just designs. That said, we have to be realistic in our expectations about how far we can get.
P: Right. But maybe we can formulate a question at least?
S: Perhaps.
P: The principle of non-commensurability doesn’t accept trade-offs concerning essential capabilities. Developing new capabilities cannot be done at the expense of others.
S: I believe that’s what Sen proposes.
P: So we can ask whether design strengthens a capability without compromising others.
S: I’m not sure about that. That formulation basically assumes that we need to consider capabilities as intertwined.
P: This is really tricky. Can we learn anything about this by looking at Transfer Ticket?
S: Mental disorders as corrosive disadvantages also lead to losses in capabilities to achieve many other valuable things in life. So mental health is vitally important. According to the principle of non-commensurability, the value of mental health cannot be calculated, traded-off, and compared with other dimensions of a good life.
P: However, if such comparisons were permitted, mental health would be high on the list of essential capabilities.
S: I guess.
P: But it’s enough to say that mental health is something that everyone should have.
S: Thus evaluating the importance of Transfer Ticket as a development project by comparing it to the effects of other solutions increasing wellbeing and happiness apart from mental health is not appropriate. Asking whether spending the same amount of money on something else instead would have a greater effect on human worth and dignity should be avoided, too.
P: Of course the question cannot be avoided.
S: No, someone has to decide.
P: Maybe we should remember to ask if our design is trading in human dignity.
Does our design trade in human dignity?
S: That, I believe we can ask. I guess it’s faithful to Sen’s principle.
P: I think it is.
S: But what do you think about our heuristics this far?
P: Let me list what we have. We asked the following questions:
•Does design bridge resources to preferred attainments?
•Does design create agents who flourish?
•Does our design improve the capability to compromise subjective wellbeing?
•Do we create sustaining capabilities and foundations for new ones to emerge?
•Does our design trade in human dignity?
S: Demanding list.
P: They are based on the capability approach, and relevant for design.
S: Are they different from the questions that we might ask anyway?
P: I think they are. In any case, they have the benefit that they’re linked to a framework of justice, development, and wellbeing. That’s why they give more conceptual support, when it is needed, to study the justice impacts of design. I think the strength of our questions is that they leave enough room for interpretations. When assessing the implications of design from the point of view of justice and wellbeing, the evaluation space has to be kept broad. Capability as the point of entrance provides us with a good overview of the relevant criteria and shouldn’t cause claustrophobic feelings even to those of us who are sensitive about making evaluations. The widening of the information base of distributional justice is one of Sen’s main drivers, and our set of questions is compatible with that.
S: Based on our exercise, I don’t think we can draw conclusions about the capability approach being an especially or more suitable framework of justice and wellbeing than any other comparable framework. We would most likely have been able to pose questions by referring to some other framework as well.
P: We kind of did that already with utilitarianism.
S: Exactly. Good design is never, at least by intention, hostile to human dignity. Thus any reasonably good framework of ethics and justice has to find some resonance with design.
P: That’s true.
S: Are we done for today?
P: I have only one more question.
S: Yes.
P: Are you going to ask me to present a wrap-up?
S: If you wish.
P: I don’t know if I want to, but I expected you to ask, so I’ve thought about it already. Instead of focusing on the capability approach, it has to be something more general for the reason you mentioned.
S: Right. And what conclusion did you come to?
P: Perhaps we should remember the motivation for our discussion rather than the results. I consider the results as examples of possible outcomes. So I’d conclude by saying something about the necessity of the transparency of design deliberation.
S: And that would be …?
P: Articulate your ethical undertaking.
Articulate your ethical undertaking.
1Ilse Oosterlaken (2013) has found that the capability approach is a feasible framework for supporting design both in a narrower sense, because it provides insight for evaluating wellbeing, and in a broader manner, because it links design thinking to topics such as agency and justice. She believes that neither extensive reading of Sen nor design tools crafted on the principles of capability can serve as practical means to introduce capabilities to the design community.
2Designed by Tamara Amalia, Sanna Tuononen, Otto Schultz, and Mike Walker (Kola 2013; Liao 2013).
3Nussbaum’s “practical reason” is not essentially different from Aristotle’s conception of prudence. Prudence deals with practical deliberation on what is good for a human being and it is a basis for all other virtues in Aristotle’s ethics. He says that “[all the virtues] are impossible without prudence” (Aristotle 1893/2004: 132). “Affiliation” comes close to Rawls’ (1971: 440–6) idea of self-respect and meaningful life projects.
4The capability approach and basic needs approach tend to be on collision courses (e.g., Reader 2006).
5Andy Dong (2008) and colleagues’ (Dong et al. 2013) work to ensure citizens’ capabilities to participate is an example of the capability approach contributing to collaborative design.
6The “Mi” concept designed by Florina Frost, Vesa Ylirisku, Kaushik Eshwar, and Nargis Guseynova, and the “Compass” concept designed by Jessie Hsu, Henri Kontkanen, Hanna Markgren, and Philip Zeitler (Keinonen, Vaajakallio, and Honkonen 2013: 74–5).
7Layard does not speak about capabilities. He believes in Bentham’s classical utilitarianism.
8The idea of fundamental need aims at simplifying ethical decisions. It defines a threshold between two categories of good things that we can do for our neighbors: ones that we might do, if we wish, and the ones that we have to do. Fundamental needs set moral obligations when they exist. The lack of a need correspondingly excuses us from doing things even if they would seem worthwhile. This makes the life of a moral actor tolerable, because it clarifies that there are neighbors’ desires that one does not need to respond to. Garrett Thomson (1987) has said that “the main feature of the concept of a need is that it makes a virtue of necessity by cutting down options and thereby simplifying choice.” Soran Reader (2007) has presented patients’ needs as the basis of ethics, which is a foundational deviation from the philosophical traditions of grounding ethics on virtuous qualities of an acting subject, on the consequences of actions, or on the principles guiding the behavior.