What is “good” design and who decides what it looks like? Perhaps the issue is in the wording of the question itself; “looks like”—is what makes a design good based only on its appearance? The answer is obviously that aesthetics alone do not determine the quality of a design. But then, what else does? What makes a design successful? Possibly, your first answer could be that commercial success determines whether or not a design is good; but it should be evident that not all commercial success is equal when all outcomes are considered. So what is “good” design? What should it be?

Standard definitions

Design, above all, is about communication. Designers convey information—like facts and figures or less tangible information like quality or value—through our skill sets; we are messengers with responsibilities to make that message as attractive as possible. This holds true no matter what you design, be it user experiences, packages, websites, ads, books, etc. We are positioned in the middle of a client (which may be a full-time employer, a freelance client, or even ourselves) and an audience and our job is to make the information the star of the show. “Good” design, then, is about the efficiency with which that information is communicated. Well, let me be more specific; this is what good design should be—it’s what I would say should be the definition. But we cannot stop there because not all information is equal, and that is where our current definitions of design go curiously quiet.

Information—especially in 2021—does not always have to be true. In general, we would say that as a society, we hold trust up as a virtue and that having someone’s trust is to have something that is very valuable indeed. The problem lies in that, for many of us, trust is implied by design cues and we don’t have the time, the inclination, or the know-how to determine if we should trust what we have heard or seen. A good design is a design that communicates efficiently, but the term “good design” itself is amoral; what we design, however, is not always benign and there’s the rub. Ending our definition of good design at efficiency leaves out the effects of impact; good design can apply to propaganda just as much as it applies to a website about voting rights. Truths and lies can be presented in good design. Designers need to be focused not just on the quality of design, but on the effects that that design may have on the society in which it was designed for. Mike Monteiro said in Ruined by Design that “we need to fear the consequences of our work more than we love the cleverness of our ideas,” and he is completely right. The finish line for our projects is not the invoice, it’s not on the shelves at the store—it’s in the minds of our audience and in where that project’s final resting place (i.e., a landfill) will be when the user is done with it.

This is an essay about “greenwashing.” It is also—as the title implies—about defining design not just as a practice of making things or rearranging content, but as a practice that affects culture, affects concepts like truth, and affects the planet on which we all live and depend. Design work can quite literally define the spaces we live and work in just as easily as it can define the “truths” that we choose to accept and the ones that we choose to deny. Morality and ethics absolutely have a place in all types of design, and it has become fashionable lately to append an ethical appeal to our practices as if it were just like adding an extension to our web browser. We have always had to deal in morality; we just chose to push that responsibility onto our clients and their audiences. In doing so, we have allowed money to be the sole decider of our paths. We cannot let this continue.

What is greenwashing?

Greenwashing is an insidious practice that lets the largest producers of our planet’s climate woes shrug off the responsibility and culpability for those woes and allows them a veneer of respectability that lets customers feel okay about continuing to support their business. Now, many people are to be blamed for this practice, not just designers—the media, for one—but designers have an especially odious part to play in the ongoing issue of greenwashing, or as it could otherwise be known as, “misleading the public for profit.”

Greenwashing often shifts the blame for climate change from the suppliers of commodities like fossil fuels to—honestly, anyone else—and works to clean up the tarnished image of the company. Shell or Exxon, for example, know that the clean technologies we need already exist, but by framing the issue as a thing that needs global collaboration makes those technologies seem more fraught and untrustworthy than they actually are. These campaigns have art directors, graphic designers, animators, and more who all come together to make fossil fuel companies look like leaders on clean energy and not companies dragging their feet and hoping to prolong the status quo for as long as possible. Campaigns like these latch on to the value we as designers create and use it to pretend to be responsible. Take a look at this fantastic article by Emily Atkin on greenwashing on social media and on news websites; these ads undermine the public’s trust in journalism, while parasitically siphoning credibility from those same institutions by proxy. Atkin writes, “But I’d also understand if people held a level of distrust for these institutions because they run misleading fossil fuel company ads without aggressively covering the impact of said ads. And that concerns me, because we won’t solve the climate crisis without powerful, trustworthy institutional journalism.” The New York Times says that “advertising helps support our newsroom, which covers the issue and impacts of climate change more than any other in the U.S,” but I’d wager that they wouldn’t have to spend as much reporting about climate change if they would stop making polluters look like viable options for people.

Maybe none of you reading this have anything to do projects like these, but these projects prolong our collective suffering and we need to start saying “no” more often. Please support those designers who pledge not to work with harmful companies if you can’t financially choose to do it yourself yet.

Why “redefine” design?

As we can see in the case of greenwashing, simply falling back on being competent designers is not enough. I was in a Zoom call with a group from Climate Designers a few months back and designer Sarah Harrison (one of CD’s co-founders) told us an anecdote about carrots that originally sparked the thought in my head that would become this essay. The anecdote was about an organic farmer she knew that wondered why she had to label her carrots as “organic” when all fruits and vegetables were originally organic. That farmer, MaryJane Butters, said, “I want to take back our language. I don’t want to call it an organic carrot. I want to call it a carrot. And then let them call theirs a chemical carrot.” This really occupied my mind for a while.

With food, we’ve defaulted to non-organic even though we originally began growing food organically. Growing food organically is now the outlier, it’s the option that is harder to do and the option that you need to opt into. Design has defaulted itself into being a pay-to-play, check-your-morality-at-the-door kind of industry and as of late, being “green” has become a kind of add-on or extra feature that you can pay more for. We can market our ethics as a competitive edge. But it shouldn’t be this way; doctors can’t practice medicine without ethics or morality and if a physician hung a sign on the door that said, “Now incorporating ethical standards into our practice,” you’d rightly wonder what they were doing before.

Before I go any further, I want to say that we should absolutely celebrate designers and studios that commit to “going green.” My point isn’t that being able to differentiate based on doing so is a cynical ploy to gain an economic advantage, but that it’s telling on our industries that we’d have to spell that out in the first place. Saying that you won’t design things that will have negative impacts—cigarette ads, greenwashing campaigns, ads for banks that rip off poor people of color, political campaigns that are harmful, etc.—is a good commitment to make, but that our industries have barely batted an eye at doing work for those sorts of clients is embarrassing at best and shameful at worst. Yes, we all have freedom of speech and the right to our opinions, I’m not denying it. I’m not saying that we should blackball designers that profit off of harm, but I am saying that we shouldn’t celebrate it. I am saying that we should codify more morality into our profession. It’s not hard to imagine; doctors have to practice by standards, so do lawyers, architects, and technically, so do PR firms. They all have some version of a “do no harm” philosophy. We should too.

Design shouldn’t have to opt-in to seeing our work through to its impacts, both cultural and physical. A designer shouldn’t just be a visual communicator. Good design shouldn’t just be judged by the efficiency of its messaging and the delight of its visual elements. Design as a practice should reexamine and reorganize itself to account for (and design for) what was always there—the consequences of our work. So how can we do this?

Awards

The very first suggestion I would make would be to ensure that design work that has a decidedly negative impact isn’t celebrated. Our industry has a lot of different award ceremonies and many designers hope to have work that makes it in. Awards can be boosts to our businesses and whether the work is displayed online, in print, or in person at a show, we can expect that prizes in these competitions will bring us future work. But given the stakes—after all, maintaining the status quo means a hotter planet for future generations—I have yet to see an award show refuse to award work done for fossil fuel companies. To be sure, I haven’t come across one that has awarded one in a while but I can find no language anywhere signifying a willingness to separate themselves from a destructive industry.

Awards shows should make clear that ads and designs for destructive products have no place in their exhibitions. That they will not be a part of publicizing that kind of work and that they will not elevate designers and firms for doing that kind of work. Perhaps spelling out the exclusion will stigmatize the work. Organizations like Clean Creatives and Slow Factory are doing this sort of thing—stigmatizing greenwashing in advertising—right now and PR firms are dropping fossil fuel companies as a result. Colleges are doing something similar as well, divesting from fossil fuel companies and saying no to being a part of funding our planet’s destruction. Awards shows need to follow suit.

Education

The second suggestion I would make would be to make exposure to systems of ethics or morality a part of our design curriculums. Including the topic in our educational system alongside the subject of climate change will go a long way toward the inculcation of climate change’s effects on our working habits. Design education should teach climate change with the same weight (and perhaps more weight) than we spend teaching students about crafting resumes and portfolios, after all, the plastic packaging our products might come in will last far longer than our resumes, and that pollution, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, is a piece of our portfolio.

Colleges absolutely should make climate a piece of the design curriculum and in doing so that will begin to normalize a climate-centered attitude within the profession as a whole, college-educated designer or not. While talking with designers as a part of the process of working on my book, I spoke to Eric Benson, author of Design to Renourish (co-written with Yvette Perullo) about what he thought the most important thing that designers could do—as designers—in both the short- and long-term to make positive industry changes when it comes to the climate. He told me:

“Every climate scientist I’ve spoken to, heard, or read say the same thing here. In the ‘now,’ everyone must talk about and read about global warming more. Discussions and lessons learned from reading should create actions small and large. In the long term, designers need to implement what they learned as soon as they can. If this requires education, then, if you can afford [it], enroll. For educators, this means they must become more well-versed in climate science for the design classroom. Groups like the Climate Designers (including myself) are helping design educators add climate science into their projects and curricula. Universities and colleges should financially support educators in this endeavor as the future of higher education also relies on a stable climate to support it.”

Our education process as designers has traditionally focused on what we make, but it hasn’t always focused on how we make it, or even, where it goes when users are done with it. So what are some ways teachers can institutionalize sustainable and climate-oriented practices in the design field? In no particular order, they could: require research into materials and their potential impact when assigning projects, spend time talking about situations in which designers were complicit in popularizing products that were detrimental to people (looking at you Joe Cool and the Marlboro Man), familiarize students with sites like wastenot.world that compile databases of sustainable products to make it easier for designers to utilize them, and more. It’s not an exhaustive list by any means; you may have some additional suggestions and I’d love to hear them.

At school, we are given a brief or assignment by a teacher and we go from there but designers can’t just stop at being communicators. If everything we make has some — big, medium, or small — consequence, then we can’t simply be communicators, we have to possess some ability to investigate or interrogate our assignments if they don’t allow us to be able to make a judgment on whether or not a thing should exist. Educators need to work this into projects in order to normalize the practice in the real world.

Defining standards

“Good” design can no longer mean either “good” as in the quality of its design or “good” as in the quality of its impact unless we are willing to connect those terms in our minds for how our industry should operate. “Good” has operated as a shield for us for too long; remember, a shield is defensive in nature, it doesn’t stop an impact, it merely deflects one. We should not sell our skills by referring to the value we add, the quality we imply, or our ability to make a campaign go viral and then turn around and leave the negative consequences of our success as a byproduct of our client or their customers.

Success and failure are not just financial states and not every success is evidence of a lack of failure. When our clients aren’t successful, we may lose work; but when our planet is in danger, we may lose a lot more than work. Let’s codify a commitment to our planet and to people in our work. Sure, not everyone will hold themselves to a standard like that, but they should be the outliers, not us. The default state of design should be to do no harm. But that cannot be an opt-in standard. We don’t opt-in to not copying someone else’s designs, or stealing fonts, or pirating software—we all may have varying ideas of what level of doing those things we can stomach, but we fundamentally understand that doing those things (publically or privately) can get us into trouble. So why should selling people on the notion that fossil fuels are safe and reliable be any different?

Right now, people’s lives—and futures—are on the line, our standards though, shouldn’t be.

Definition of graphic design in the leading image from Merriam-Webster, here