ABSTRACT
Chapter 1.2 explores how ethics has intersected with architectural production and how involving stakeholders in shaping the built environment can help create opportunities for serving and engaging marginalized communities.
The chapter examines professional ethics codes in a variety of national contexts. At the building scale, national organizations such as the AIA or NCARB in the United States and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, or RIBA in Britain have written professional ethics codes, while other national governing boards, notably in Europe, have linked ethics to questions of national or regional “building culture.” Philosophical treatises, on the other hand, have regarded “ethics” as an aesthetic and semantic device in a self-referential approach geared largely towards designers.
Contrasting with this, user-centered approaches to design have expanded ethical concerns by incorporating stakeholders into the design process. This chapter discusses such user-centered approaches, some used in fields outside the built environment, as part of a new ethical framework for design and practice. Such approaches include universal design, stakeholder theory, participatory, collaborative, co-design, and value-sensitive design.
