مهشید بارانی

This article interprets design not merely as a technical activity but as a site for the realization of ethical life in Hegel’s sense. Its theoretical framework builds on Hegel’s tripartite ethical model, right (recht), morality (moralität), and ethical Life (sittlichkeit), to show how design experience, when situated in institutional roles, mediation of value tensions, and practices of mutual recognition, contributes to the actualization of freedom and responsibility in the social sphere. Methodologically, the study adopts an interpretive–analytical approach, drawing on a close reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and major commentaries, brought into dialogue with contemporary literature on design ethics. Findings indicate that the legal and institutional structuring of design, while necessary as the formal ground of freedom, remains insufficient unless complemented by the internalization of responsibility at the individual level and its further embedding within social and professional institutions. Only through this progression can design approach what Hegel conceptualized as “freedom realized in the world of human institutions.” The analysis further reveals that ethical tensions, arising from conflicting stakeholder demands or gaps between individual ideals and institutional realities, are not peripheral but constitutive drivers of moral reflection in design practice. Yet the same institutional structures that enable recognition and accountability may also impose constraints that limit the scope of freedom’s realization. The study concludes that design can serve as a formative arena of ethical life, where freedom, duty, and mutual recognition are historically and socially shaped and reinterpreted. This reframing provides a conceptual foundation for future research on how design experience both reflects and shapes moral life within diverse institutional contexts.

The product resulting from the design process can be depicted as a text carrying the meaning whose readers are its users. Among the prominent theories dealing with the category of the meaning in the text, the reception hermeneutic in epistemology, and the experience approach in design, have been discussed in this research. This study aimed to find out whether it is possible to compare the author with the designer, after assuming the product as a text. It also addressed the type of interaction with the user from a reception hermeneutic perspective in the experience design approach. In this regard, subjects such as understanding, reception, and generally, interpretation of the product have also been studied using library sources and the descriptive-analytical method. The results indicate that the phenomenon of the text reading in the reception hermeneutic approach is comparable to the experience at the thinking level in the process of user-product interaction. In other words, text reading can be equated with product experience.