Professional Obligations

This is an extract about ethics from my latest book, "Intense Design".  I have had five serious ethical challenges in my career and they can be very painful.

You claim expertise in a discipline in order to richly contribute to your field. However, legal implications arise when you assert expertise. Specifically, you can be considered liable if you are negligent in your work. The legal terms will be discussed in more detail later; however, it is helpful to recognize your legal standing as a professional who ‘professes’ expertise in something. This summary of the standard to which you might be held comes from the 1954 State of California’s case law in Gagne v. Bertran, (43 Cal.2d 481). Under the “The Cause of Action for Negligence,” it states:

The services of experts are sought because of their special skill. They have a duty to exercise the ordinary skill and competence of members of their profession, and a failure to discharge that duty will subject them to liability for negligence. Those who hire such persons are not justified in expecting infallibility, but can expect only reasonable care and competence. They purchase service, not insurance (SCOCAL).

Ethical Design and Legal Considerations

Designers understand their products better than anyone. They know what they will and won’t do. However, what do you do when your design is not allowed to be safe? Who defines, “what is safe?” The qualifications of the user often dictate standards of safety. Children are assumed to be untrained and unpredictable (“presumptively capable of negligence,” in legalese). If users are engineers, they should be considered highly trained and technically sophisticated. Those claiming a profession are professing expertise in certain areas and are held to a higher standard of expectations in the safe usage of a product or system.

As a design professional, you can be considered professionally negligent if you are not reasonably competent to do your work, or if you do your work poorly. There is a standard of care expected by the public and you are responsible for preserving and maintaining that confidence. The standard of care delivered by a design professional changes over time. For example, advances in research, instrumentation, and computer modeling raise the expected standard of care.