Conference Agenda

Knowledge of professional design is (re)produced through discourse and its culture of use: from the language used, interactions with others and objects created, to the techniques and procedures that connect and distribute professional design knowledge. Here, discourse both shapes and is shaped by social practices and communicated through structures such as codes of conduct and codes of ethics. This paper explores the discourse of codes of conduct and codes of ethics for professional design developed by peak design organisations. We argue that such codes serve as forms of industry self-regulation encapsulating designers’ responsibilities and the ethics of their practices. However, codes of conduct and codes of ethics are conflated and reduce ethics and the responsibility of design(ers) to instruments and procedures which, though well-intended, without governance, are flawed. The paper proposes recommendations for revising these codes to better nurture ethical awareness and accountability in professional design practices.

The Information Technology (IT) sector is the current Athens of all industry. It is no longer geeky, but chic, defining the modes and limits of modern civilization. IT in its numerous forms provides the vehicle of expression and citizenship in contemporary times. While more women designers and developers enter the field are they experienc-ing a stronger sense of equality? This paper reports a narrative inquiry that probed the experiences of women professionals in the IT field. Particular attention was placed on how females entered the field, the roles and tasks that they often found themselves undertaking, and social factors in organizational communication that were specific to being female in the field. The results indicate biased conditions. Historical discourse promoting men as creative and intellectual (I.e., technical) still thrives and women are seen as administrators (crafts people). The paper ponders how these social dynamics affect the cognitive-affective processes of women developers.

Ethics is complex and situated, involving many stakeholders that impact the design of technology systems. Numerous methods and tools have been proposed to enable practitioners to address ethical issues in the workplace. However, little work has described how designers themselves understand and seek to respond to that ethical complexity. In this short paper, we present five transformation structures that visually and relationally depict how ethics might be addressed in a workplace setting. We base these structures on analysis of plans that 39 practitioners and students created in a co-design workshop to address an ethical concern in their job role. We evaluated the diagrams of these workshop plans and identified five different types of structures that could lead to potential transformation of ethical practices: parallel, linear, top-down, loopy, and gordian. We identify how these transformation structures differently inscribe expectations of ethical mediation and action, leading to opportunities for further support of ethical practices by practitioners.

This paper presents a means of communicating to design students the appropriate use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in their studies. It underscores the need to consider broader aspects such as individual student identity and ethical considerations, given the emerging popularity of GenAI. The paper explores the necessity for students to acknowledge their use of GenAI. It draws parallels between GenAI and traditional design resources, likening the use of GenAI to leveraging other designers' work and assistance received during projects. This analogy is employed as a strategy to link the decision to disclose the use of GenAI with the students' designer identity. The delineation between contexts in which students are permitted to use GenAI and those in which they are encouraged to do so is tied to their intended learning outcomes. Several case studies, both hypothetical and real, are discussed and analyzed to support the points raised in this paper.

This paper addresses the inclusion of relationality as a concept in design. Relational-ity is primarily brought into design from adjacent disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, where the concept helps understand aspects of kinship, care, and belonging. The concept is also infused with elements of associative thinking. The paper narratively reviews examples of relationality in literature from design-related scholarly discourse. The literature sample covers papers addressing relationality through case studies or conceptual calls for practice change. The results from this review provide three understandings of relationality: 1) The utilitarian that unpacks social relations as an epistemic and functional source for designing objects. 2) The communitarian that unpacks the designer's situation and context as part of world-making communities. 3) The associative that unpacks opportunities to condition new –social– relations through interventions. The paper concludes by reflecting on the potential of relationality to promote positive transformations.

Design research can help us understand, dismantle, and transform unjust systems and the material realities that they create, while guiding us towards transformative, radical futures yet to be designed. However, design research can also be a site of harm and trauma. We argue that a “do no harm” guiding principle to ethics in design research is insufficient. Rather, design researchers need to reckon with and prepare for the likelihood that they will cause harm to the people and communities they engage in their design processes. We draw from the ethics of care and accountability theorized and explored by feminist thought in order to delineate a trauma-responsive design research model. This model can help design researchers take accountability as they work to minimize, acknowledge, and repair harm. Moreover, establishing a praxis of trauma responsiveness as an ethical imperative in design work can help design researchers amplify the liberatory potential of their practice.