Please Complete My Dissertation Survey On Design Ethics :)

Design Discussions general design discussion
1

Hello, I’m doing some research for my final year dissertation project as part of my university degree in Industrial Design.

The questionnaire is about your opinion of ethical issues relating to products and how it affects your consumer behaviour. As well as questions on your opinion of ethics relating to the design process.

If you are an Industrial Designer or a Product Designer from the western world e.g. UK, USA then would you please complete my questionnaire for me? (I say this due to cultural differences, I want to target just western industrial designers and consumers) I would really appreciate it!

Link to the questionnaire (modified to make it shorter to increase completion rate): The Effects of Ethics on Consumer Behaviour &The Design Process Survey

Thanks,

Tom

2

I stopped at this question,

Please rank all relevant factors which would cause you to overlook unethical behaviour by companies. 1 being the most important

If a company is unethical, what makes you believe I would over look that fact?

3

I did the same thing as iab. I have actually quit a company because i was asked to do something unethical, and when i did i was told i didn’t understand how the world worked.
They gave me 3 days to decide if i was going to be a “team player” or not. When i gave them my resignation on the third day they where scrambling to change their stance and keep me. But none of their offers outweigh their willingness to conduct unethical business practices or to accept them as “the norm”

4

I see you modified that question, well done.

I thought it was quite a good survey.

I once designed a bottle, with a shape optimized to fit in the hand. The shape was very nice for its size.
Then the client wanted the bottle to contain significantly more and we couldn’t just uniformly scale it up because of the ergonomics.
We also couldn’t go back to revising the design since a lot of money and time were already invested, so it became a bottle that lost a lot of its original aesthetic appeal. I think that is unethical as well since there was no good balance of beauty, profitability and usability.

I also worked on projects where a lot of plastic was used to add only a marginal amount of value to the brand, so now I am much more conscious of minimizing material consumption.