Ethical Design
THEE Frameworks are Tools for Design
The rationale for any THEE inquiry has been to improve the design of human systems by understanding the nature of the human element. Human beings can only flourish creatively if our psychosocial world is designed in accord with our higher nature and deepest capacities.
Taxonomic inquiry has been focused on making observations and ordering them, not on explaining the observations or the ordering. Only theories provide explanations, and THEE is a map not a theory. Frameworks can (and will and should) be used to explain, but that is a secondary use: their primary function is design.
Features of this Taxonomy naturally provoke curiosity and invite conjectures i.e. scientific inquiry meta- to THEE. It took until 2013 for sufficient observations and confidence to enable commencement of such scientific investigations: see Architecture Room.
THEE-Design Offers Effectiveness
Physical-technical factors aside, human effectiveness depends on acting, organizing and managing in ways that run with the grain of human nature and social life.
Such inquiry is transdisciplinary in nature. There are already well-established alternative forms of inquiry to guide action: examined in the next Topic. But these do not put human nature at the forefront of their concerns or as a principal criterion for useful knowledge. So their value to guide people in practice is correspondingly weakened.
Organizations and systems are regularly designed or prescribed in ways that either deny human frailty or crush human creativity. That is why we so often see large projects becoming ineffective, wasteful, and socially dysfunctional.
Complex design tools developed from THEE, perhaps best termed «experiential/intellectual technologies», require people to think about what they are doing and to consider others in a deeper and more organized fashion than is now customary.
- Compare alternative sources of knowledge for action.
Originally posted: August 2009; Last updated 2-Jan-2013.