Abstract:

Ethical responsibility in design is often framed around large-scale impacts, regulatory frameworks, or exceptional dilemmas, while the everyday decisions that structure design practice tend to remain largely invisible within ethical discourse. As a result, ethics is frequently perceived by designers as an external constraint or a separate layer applied after core design decisions have already been made. This paper introduces the concept of microdesign to describe the small, routine, and frequently normalized decisions embedded in daily design practice that cumulatively generate systemic social, cultural, environmental, and behavioral effects.

Grounded in systemic design thinking and microsociological approaches to everyday action, the study adopts a qualitative and practice-based methodology combining reflective analysis of professional design projects with observational insights from higher education design contexts. The research examines recurring decision-making patterns related to material selection, visual hierarchy, interaction flow, interface affordances, communicative tone, accessibility thresholds, and spatial organization, treating these decisions as ethical micro-actions embedded within workflows, tools, and institutional cultures.

The findings reveal that these microdesign decisions consistently shape user behavior, expectations, and power relations over time, despite being rarely articulated as ethical choices by designers themselves. Making such decisions explicit enables practitioners to recognize ethical dimensions that are typically overlooked, particularly those related to inclusion, exclusion, persuasion, sustainability, and normalization of design conventions. Designers exposed to the microdesign perspective demonstrate an increased awareness of the interdependencies between local design actions and broader systemic consequences, as well as a shift from rule-based ethical reasoning toward responsibility understood as an ongoing professional practice.

The paper concludes that ethical responsibility in design does not primarily emerge from isolated moral choices or compliance mechanisms, but from the accumulation of ordinary decisions that become stabilized through repetition. By reframing ethics as an accumulative, systemic, and practice-based dimension of everyday design activity, the concept of microdesign offers a transferable framework for designers, studios, and educational institutions seeking to integrate ethical responsibility directly into daily design processes rather than treating it as an exceptional or external concern.

Keywords:

Microdesign, systemic design, ethical responsibility, design practice, everyday decision-making, professional ethics, microsociology.