Responsability in web design?
The word “responsibility” derives from the Latin verb respondere meaning to “reply” or “respond.” Responsibility places human action in causal contexts of temporal, social, religious, and other meaning. Morally it is regarded as a positive value. In order to derive a concept of responsibility relevant to design, it makes sense first to differentiate the meanings of the term.
Two categorizations can help with that. The first is seeing responsibility as a multilayered phenomenon, whereby the primary responsibility is that of the particular task and deed, the secondary responsibility is that of accountability or jurisdiction, and the tertiary responsibility is liability as compensation and punishment. The second is the ethic of responsibility according to Max Weber, in which estimating the cosequences for possible actions of politicians is contrasted with the ethics of conviction.
For design, as a primarily active practice that intervenes in real-world circumstances, the responsibility of action proves to be a useful means of orientation. Systematic and time parameters are relevant to responsibility in the design process. Invention, innovation, economy, production, reception, function, and form all serve as systematic parameters.
The past, present, and future serve as time parameters. Ideally, design takes responsibility for creativity, historical reflection, and orientation for the future. How these aspects are to be apportioned, valued, and accounted for is, however, largely subject to the designer’s conviction. Thus in the view of many designers, design’s responsibility is reactive and demand-oriented as it is based on economic success.
Others, in turn, see design’s responsibility as being in the field of proactive and world-changing modernizations and improvements in the culture of communication and objects. The question of whether design should actively change the world, or whether conversely the living world should generate design, is the polarizing fundamental question designers are asking themselves today.
Ultimately it is also the question determining action and thus relevant when assigning responsibility. From it we can derive a descriptive concept of responsibility for design. Whereas the designer oriented toward demand simply acts on the basis of economic success, the proactive concept of responsibility in design is more complex. The latter considers not only the economic consequences but also and above all the social, political, ecological, and ethical consequences of that design.
Nevertheless, neither of these convictions precludes integrative action. This results in a complex ethics of responsibility for design that can be described as a variable for designer action and thus as a free responsibility analogous to Max Weber’s ethics of responsibility in the following ways: first, the necessary differentiation and ideally reconciliation between design’s objective (success) and vision (social responsibility); second, the analysis of the actions of designers in the historical discourse (learning from history); third, identifying parameters relevant to production and sales; and fourth (as a proxy for design’s truthfulness), the generation of creative, new, usable, and original solutions avoiding repetitions. Nevertheless design must be subjected to the shifting nature of responsibility through discourse with reality.
In particular, the great significance of the delimitation and recreation of contexts in design sometimes calls for a type of responsibility that is project-specific. According to Aristotle, coercion, necessity, error, and mental illness can partly or completely relieve one of responsibility.