David Berman was the keynote speaker for the first night of Design Ethos, and spoke to the importance of accountability in design and the ethics required to be a designer. A Canadian communication designer and author of the book, Do Good, Berman is also a Fellow, and the Ethics Chair of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, and President of the first elected board of the Association of Registered Graphic Designers of Ontario.
Core77: How did you first get involved in working on the Code of Ethics for designers?
David Berman: When I first got out of school, I started my own design studio, which was very much about typography. I was completely immersed in typographic design—I could create these wonderful perfect little worlds of columns of type with hanging punctuation and column rules and just the right type. and ignored the messy world outside. So, I was pretty happy. I had this radical feminist girlfriend at the time and we got into a debate one night about the role of the designer in society. She was blaming a lot on designers. She was talking about objectification of women, environmental impacts, and all that. Mostly it was about women. And I said, 'You're crazy. I mean, I buy into feminism but I do not think that I am responsible for all of that.' But I was wrong. She convinced me that it designers were responsible for the images they propagated. I decided that I had to do something about it.
I wrote up this manifesto to have a national Code of Ethics about how designers need to take responsibility for their portrayal of women and the environment and took it to my first ever meeting of my local chapter of the Graphic Designers of Canada,. It was the annual general meeting and so mostly boring and at the very end, they asked, 'Is there any other business?' I put up my hand and said, 'Yes, I have this manifesto for designers!'
Then this debate starts happening, back and forth. One person said, 'That makes no sense! We just follow orders from the clients,' and then his wife and business partner stands up and just says, 'Actually, I've always been a little annoyed by the way we just do this stuff.' The woman in charge of the chapter, Mary Ann Maruska, pulled me aside and said, 'Are you serious about this?' I was. She told me, 'In order to do this, this isn't something we do at the local level. We do it at the national level.'
It took twelve years, but I became president of the chapter and then became a part of the national executive and I led the development of a new Code of Ethics. We wrote the code to include all of this stuff on feminism, environmentalism, messaging culture, and we had a national committee.
David Berman's book, Do Good.
In addition to the Code of Ethics, you've been a huge mover in the certification of designers in Canada. How did that develop?
There was another movement going on at the time—the idea of certifying our profession, the idea that graphic design should be recognized just like any other certified profession: lawyers, doctors, engineers, nurses. And we achieved that in Ontario: the only place in the Americas where graphic design is a certified profession.
Are you seeing this movement develop in the States?
I've spoken several times in the US about the idea of certification of graphic designers. The response is cold: "No! Anyone can design! Don't tell me who can design! Don't regulate my industry!' To me, that's very limited thinking. Certification doesn't stop anyone from designing I'm thinking, you're professionals. You should be recognized as professionals, committed to a protected minimum standard.
What does that standard look like?
If you want to be a lawyer, registered nurse, engineer or a doctor, you go to school, intern, work with experience professionals, pass an exam, and then earn a certificate eventually they give you a certificate and say, 'Here. You're a doctor. Everyone can trust that you have committed to a minimum standard of knowledge, ethics, and procedures.'
We designers have as much power as any of those professions. We could argue we have more power over what is going on in the world than many of other professions that are certified. We've been remiss to recognize that power.
When you certify a profession, it means you say, okay, the schools have a curriculum, which they've developed in concert with the professional organizations to make sure the people coming out of the school have what they need; you have formal examinations, which in Ontario has four parts. Only one quarter of it is about design knowledge (do you know what RGB is versus CMYK). Another quarter of it is how do you run a professional practice. Another quarter on ethics So, for example, that when you promise to deliver a project, you'll still deliver it even if you realize it will not be profitable for you.
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