Output details

Bypassing ethics via design: ethical discourses in the road design process

This output derives from a research seminar presented at The Open University in 2009 as part of a series in philosophical ethics. The output was earmarked by peer reviewers as one of 30 papers to watch (out of a total of 220 papers at the IASDR conference). The research is based on a public archive of material relating to the design and construction of a road bypass in 1996 upon which, shortly after opening, several people lost their lives. The output reconstructs the design process of the bypass, using textual and visual documentation, in attempting to determine to what extent the designers that took part in that process might be considered responsible for the deaths that occurred. The output identifies two conflicting discourses of the design process – one couched in the ambiguous terms of the documented process itself, the other couched in terms of the inevitability of the ethically bad outcome. There are two key findings. The first is in identifying and breaking down the aesthetic components of ethical decision-making in design, something previously theorized but not shown empirically. The second is to show the social nature of imagination in design processes. The output thus contributes to the growing body of design theory that considers actual design processes in more social, complex, and nuanced ways.