Conference Agenda

With the ever-more present climate crisis, resource shortage and the expansion of AI, the core question of the ethical aspects of our development of new products and solutions becomes unavoidable. But which topics are commonly discussed in design ethics literature and how has it evolved? To answer this question and to understand the existing underpinnings and foundation of ethics in design, we adopted a structured literature review searching literature across 42 renowned scientific design journals. A systematic search revealed 1177 academic publications relating to the topic. After filtering and reviewing the titles, abstracts and keywords of these publications, a total of 121 sources were singled out as qualified to constitute the foundation of this review. From these, 8 central themes in past and present design ethics research were identified: Design processes and practices, design education, participatory/co-creation, responsible design, social design, sustainability, technology, and human-centred design This opens a discussion of future research, what are we missing?

Design researchers have previously sought to describe, model, and represent the cognitive processes of designers. In parallel, researchers in HCI and STS have identified a range of frameworks to describe the ethical and value-related char-acter of design activity. We have identified a productive gap between these two sets of literature—namely, the role of analytic methods in describing ethical de-cision-making as one aspect of design complexity. In this paper, we describe and explore an approach for quantifying the ethical character of design decision-making, building upon existing critical approaches from HCI and STS literature. Through a series of visualizations at varying temporal scales and numbers of inter-locutors, we seek to describe the ethical complexity of design activity, grounded in a set of ethically focused lab protocol studies. We describe the implications of our approach for mixed methods researchers, including the role of quantitative methods in describing temporal aspects of ethical design complexity.

The idea that technologies influence society—both positively and negatively—is not new. This is mainly the terrain of the philosophy and the ethics of technology research. Similarly, design research aims to help create new technologies in line with individual, social, and societal needs and values. Against this backdrop, it seems essential to expose relations between design and philosophy of technology research, particularly from a methodological perspective. The main goal of this paper is to suggest a preliminary overview of methods and approaches that can inspire and inform interdisciplinary collaboration and, with that, systematic engagement with ethics in design processes. Through interdisciplinary exchange, we propose a preliminary typology of ethics-informed methods and approaches based on two main dimensions, namely theory-grounded approaches to theoretically-flexible techniques and assessment to accompaniment. This mapping intends to help navigate the ethical qualities of selected methods from both disciplines, and it aims to create a platform for fruitful interdisciplinary conversations.

Navigating ethical considerations in participatory design is complex and ever-changing. The Co-production Project explores the use of co-production methods (co-discover, co-plan, co-design, co-deliver, co-evaluate) via a case study of women’s health in Aotearoa New Zealand. Based in an Arts and Design University, ‘academic ethics’ influence the project in tangible ways that are often procedural and prescriptive, with a focus on productivity. However, co-production methods — underpinned by principles of power-sharing and prioritisation of relationships — call for softer and less tangible considerations aligned with an ethics of care. These tangible and intangible ethical considerations are frequently in tension with each other while also being responsive to indigenous cultural requirements. Through our practice-based project we’ll demonstrate how taking time to create conditions conducive to participatory approaches gives us cause for early and cautious optimism.

Within the last decade a large corpus of work in HCI as well as the commercial design practice has focused on systematically addressing questions of ethics, values and moral considerations embedded in the design of digital technology. Recent critiques have highlighted that these efforts fall short of actual transformative impact. We use the sociological concept of imaginaries to argue that value and ethics work needs to be considered within the larger context of socially shared visions of a desirable future and outline how existing sociotechnical imaginaries pre-frame contexts in which value work is deployed. We demonstrate that imaginaries provide the language and conceptual framework necessary to address underlying ethical worldviews before ethics driven design methods and toolkits can be successfully employed. Finally we suggest how to engage imaginaries to facilitate a broader shift towards a more politically sensitive approach to designerly value work.