The Solution

Design is, in one sense, a promise. You are promising to solve a problem your users are experiencing. Like all promises, you should honour this promise. You must be honest and clear about the ability and limitations of your design. Moreover, your design should be tailored to the problem it’s trying to solve – and be intended to solve a genuine problem. Good design serves an ethical purpose and does so in efficient and effective ways. Design can reinforce social disadvantage, or it can help people overcome it. But it can only do this if we bear in mind all the possible users, without dismissing some groups as ‘edge cases’.