Design Morality

Just yesterday, Google released an announcement that it may consider withdrawing itself from China in light of the Chinese government's censorship policies. Google had suffered backlash in 2006 when it agreed to censor its results in China, so many praised Google for finally standing up to the Chinese government. Others see it as a last-ditch attempt to salvage some good press out of a poor branch (Google has struggled to increase market share past 25-30% in China, and Google could rebuild what reputation it lost in 2006).

Whatever Google's motives, it brings up the interesting point of morality in business, and in design. Matt Parkinson spoke last quarter about designing for human variability, and how design may result in disproportionate exclusion of certain demographics. As designers, we need to ask ourselves the question: is the greater evil for a designer to do work he opposes, or to deprive end users of the value the designer could have added?

One of Google's 10 "commandments" is to "Do no evil". Is censorship evil, though? Regulation of information occurs in parental control, and website age restrictions, and fewer people argue against it. It might be argued that censorship is a sub-optimal solution due to the net reduction in available information--sub-optimal, however, is not evil. I personally contend that Google censored in China is better than no Google in China.

Let's hear from you: when faced with a situation where there may be no perfect solutions, what and how do we prioritize?