Conference Agenda

Conducting design research in hard-to-enter care environments with children affected by stroke poses important ethical questions. Research focuses on procedural ethics or on situated ethics, emphasizing a hard-cut between research practices be-fore and during fieldwork. This paper explores this duality through an investigation of publicly available existing materials (i.e., biographies and YouTube videos). What was intended as a preparatory step before ‘entering the field’ becomes the primary way to better understand the role of the built environment in everyday lives of families affected by childhood stroke. In this paper we reflect on the shared space the investigation creates within a research consortium. We highlight how this exploration invites thinking differently about research practices in terms of ethics related to using existing materials as data, developing sensitivity to the research context, and opportunities for allowing differences between collaborating researchers.

Designing requires great social and moral responsibility as we are surrounded by products and services that shape -and simultaneously get shaped by- the way we live. This asks for active reflection on ethical issues. However, with the classical top-down approach, ethics may be perceived as restrictive, setting boundaries for what is allowed and what not. Within philosophy of technology, ethical reflection is moving towards a more constructive approach, accompanying technological development with careful considerations. This paper takes a step further and proposes something that could be called 'creative ethics', where a bottom-up approach in dealing with ethical issues fosters inspiration and imagination for desirable futures. This is illustrated with a case study on designing gender-neutral toilet facilities with students from the University of Antwerp and Saxion University of Applied Sciences. The resulting speculative designs open up the discussion about human values, personal identity and how we relate to each other.

The Non-Identity Problem (NIP) is a philosophical puzzle which challenges our intuitive assumptions and reasoning around the question of our moral obligations towards ‘future people’. This paper explores the significance of the NIP for design, an activity which is necessarily both future-oriented and ethical in nature. Through examination of two thought experiments proposed by philosopher Derek Parfit, this paper makes two contributions to the field of design ethics. Firstly, it raises the profile of the NIP as a topic of interest and for further study in design ethics research. The second is to propose that philosophical thought experiments can play a practical role in equipping designers for real-world challenges. When employed as thinking devices to disrupt our existing ways of thinking, thought experiments open up spaces of creative disequilibrium in which to nurture, exercise, and strengthen mental capacities for approaching the ethically complex challenges of future-oriented design practice.

This paper describes a design anthropology approach toward design ethics, which understands design ethics in a relational and emergent manner. We characterize how ethical issues and judgments emerge from the continuous stream of social interactions, collaborations, and relations that constitute the design process. The approach recognizes that there is a fundamental uncertainty in how social engagements and associated ethical issues in a design process unfold. Design anthropology aims to remain open to such emergent understandings, and fosters a sense of empathy and practice of care towards collaborators. The approach is illustrated by reflecting on empirical findings from an interdisciplinary energy transition project in Amsterdam South-East. The findings show how unexpected ethical issues emerged in the design process that challenged the authors to navigate, with care and empathy, between the opposing needs of project collaborators.

Design futures -- as a subfield and as an approach -- responds directly to the precarity and uncertainty of our present. Within this context, the notion that "there will be no future" becomes the dominant vision. This paper argues that design, as a future-making praxis, should embrace ‘care’ to be able to respond to precarity. This paper draws on feminist care ethics and the concept of ‘matters of care’ to explore the theo-retical foundations for a care-informed approach to cultivate future-oriented respon-sibility in design. Care is situated, responsive and relational, and it resists reduction to step-by-step methods or toolkits. Thus, while there is a growing body of work around care ethics in the field of design, application of such concepts in design remains chal-lenging. We draw on examples from ethnographic field work to understand current future-making practices and trace possibilities for fostering care in design.