Design is never neutral. The stories we choose to tell, the way we frame information, and the experiences we create all carry moral weight. While we work with organizations that have complex and sometimes contradictory practices, we maintain clear boundaries about what narratives we will and will not help create.
This living document serves as a record of our values, commitments, and the principles that guide our work as storytellers. We commit to reviewing this document annually, evaluating our decisions against these principles, and updating this document as our understanding evolves.
Our Values
Design is storytelling, and storytelling is not neutral. Every exhibition, briefing center, and experience we create makes arguments about what matters, who has authority, and what version of reality visitors should accept. We commit to acknowledging the persuasive power of our work and accepting responsibility for the narratives we help create.
Honest communication serves the public good. When organizations misrepresent themselves — whether through selective omission, false emphasis, or misleading narratives — they erode public trust and prevent informed decision-making. We commit to declining projects that require us to create misleading narratives about organizations, regardless of how prestigious or profitable those projects might be.
Our work should not contradict our documented values. We have taken public positions on environmental sustainability, economic and racial justice, and the responsible use of technology. We cannot credibly maintain these positions while using our skills to undermine them. We commit to declining work that would require us to promote views fundamentally opposed to our documented values, even when those projects are high-profile or financially attractive.
We will not exploit communities for credibility. Using marginalized communities’ stories to build our reputation while simultaneously working against their interests is a betrayal of trust and an abuse of our platform. We commit to maintaining consistency between the values we signal through our portfolio and the full scope of our client work.
We evaluate projects for narrative content, not organizational purity. Most organizations have contradictions and complications in their funding, history, or business practices. Working with imperfect clients is different from helping them misrepresent their imperfections. We commit to evaluating projects based on the specific narrative we’re being asked to create, not solely on a client’s funding sources, business model, or institutional complexity.
When conflicts of interest exist, we apply a higher standard. Funding sources can influence narratives in subtle ways — not through direct censorship but through institutions’ desire to maintain relationships or avoid controversy. When funders have direct interest in content outcomes, we evaluate whether the scope has been narrowed to avoid uncomfortable topics and whether content within that scope tells difficult truths. We commit to asking not just “is this technically accurate?” but “is the scope honest and does it engage critically with complexity?”
What This Means in Practice
We may work with organizations that have:
- Funding from sources we disagree with (e.g., museums with fossil fuel donors, institutions with controversial benefactors)
- Controversial aspects to their business or history (e.g., companies involved in defense or complex industries, historical figures with problematic legacies)
- Complex, mixed records on issues we care about (e.g., corporations transitioning from harmful to sustainable practices)
- Stakeholders, board members, or parent companies whose values differ from ours
However, we will decline projects that require us to:
- Create false equivalencies or undermine scientific consensus (e.g., presenting “both sides” of settled science as equally valid)
- Glorify harm, violence, or weapons of war
- Sanitize historical injustices or minimize their impact
- Create greenwashing campaigns or misleading environmental narratives
- Promote ideological positions fundamentally opposed to our documented values on economic justice, racial equity, or environmental sustainability
- Design experiences that misrepresent organizations or present them as something they are not
We recognize that:
- Most large institutions have problematic aspects — we don’t require purity
- The specific content matters more than the organization’s complete history
- Context, framing, and honesty distinguish ethical from unethical narrative work
- These principles require judgment and cannot be reduced to simple categorical rules
- We cannot detect all forms of subtle funding influence, particularly when topics are quietly excluded before we’re engaged
- We may make mistakes and will acknowledge them when we do
Ongoing Actions
This is a list of our ongoing actions; this list is reviewed and updated at the end of each calendar year.
New Actions
- (2025) We have established an internal project evaluation framework that requires leadership to explicitly consider whether a project would require promoting views opposed to our documented values, and whether conflicts of interest exist that would require applying heightened scrutiny.
- (2024) We declined to bid on a high-profile project that would have required us to promote economic and political viewpoints contradicting our documented commitments to economic and racial justice. While this decision represented significant potential revenue, it reinforced our commitment to maintaining consistency between our stated values and our project selection.
- (2022) We deliberately declined engagement with the “Metaverse.” While fully capable of building projects or leading conversations, we judged that it reflects a worldview we don’t want to advance. Our focus remains on using technology to enrich real-world interactions and address real-world challenges.
Continued Actions
- (2024) We maintain internal documentation of projects we decline based on values conflicts to ensure we can demonstrate our commitment to these principles over time and evaluate patterns in our decision-making.
Research Topics
This is a list of topics that we are actively researching, and hope to incorporate into our ongoing actions in the upcoming year.
- We are developing clearer internal frameworks for distinguishing between “working with imperfect organizations honestly” and “helping organizations misrepresent themselves,” including guidance on when complexity justifies engagement versus when it becomes rationalization.
- We are exploring how to more clearly communicate our values-based approach in proposals and RFP responses, allowing potential clients to self-select based on alignment with our principles.
- We are investigating how other creative firms have documented and enforced narrative ethics principles, and whether there are industry precedents or frameworks we can learn from or contribute to.
- We are examining how to better identify and evaluate subtle funding influence during discovery, particularly in cases where self-censorship may have occurred before we’re engaged in a project.