A brief look at emergency management consultants, their identity as a designer, and the need for design ethics.

1. Designing Ethics
for Emergency
Management
Consultants
Operational Coherence
Gregory Vigneaux, M.S.
“What we are talking
about is how one
should live.” -Socrates

2. An (Un)Designerly Beginning to Ethics
• Applied vs. Co-existing with ethical
codes
• Defining the consultant as a designer
• Pose an opening question to design
ethics for emergency management
consultants

3. Consultants Are Designers
"Anywhere intentional action is taken toward a predetermined desirable end design
is present" (Vigneaux, 2023, p.13).
"For as I will begin to show, in design the stakes are larger than are often thought, and -an
uncomfortable fact that nonetheless must be taken on board -they are not in the end
different from those which pertain to ethics as a whole" (Dilnot, 2005, p.6).
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4. Consultants Are Designers
Acting in Service of Another
"Service in terms of design, demands a heightened and refined ability to 'listen' - to hear
what is pressing for expression, as much as what is being outwardly expressed" (Nelson &
Stolterman, 2014, p.47).
There is then an imperative to listen and define what is desired but not yet
articulated and bring it into being as part of the broader solution.
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5. Do I Have the Right to
Design This?
An Ethical Quandary
"So an ethics of design must now constitute itself as, in effect, an ethics adequate to deal
with artifice and all its implications" (Dilnot, 2005, p.8).
Has the client been engaged in the design process to develop capacity within the
organization so they can produce the same work later?
Are the client’s level of knowledge, skills, and abilities at a level where they will benefit
from the engagement and design outcome?
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6. Dilnot, C. (2005). Ethics? Design? In S. Tigerman (Ed.), The Archeworks Papers (Vol. One, pp. 1-151). Chicago, IL: Archeworks.
Nelson, H. G., & Stolterman, E. (2012). The Design Way: Intentional change in an unpredictable world (Second ed.). Cambridge ,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Vigneaux, G. J. (2023). A design philosophy for emergency management. In S. M. van Manen, C. Jaenichen, T. S. Lin, K. Kremer, & R. Ramírez
(Eds.), Design for emergency management (pp. 13-30). New York: Routledge.
References
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