Ethical design: a foundation for visual communication (original) (raw)

Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis: "Ethical Design: a foundation for visual communication." Robert Gordon University, 2016.

Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics 2017, 2017

This paper presents a collection of 'ethical by design' principles for considering ethical aspects in the design and implementation of technology-based products and services. It is a work-in-progress describing the need for new, innovative concepts and approaches in ethical design-based thinking. The paper argues that design thinking should and can be 'ethical by design'; that designs should strive to go beyond the ethical guidelines that are set by regulatory bodies and other such governance. This manifesto of 'ethical by design' principles is intended to support developers, providers, and users in the collaborative process of inherently and explicitly including ethics into product and service design.

Head-Hand-Heart: Ethics in Design - Keynote at Istanbul

Our understanding of design has been evolving steadily over the past 100 years and in recent years there has been a rush of new research into a variety of dimensions and Ethics is one the many dimensions that have received research attention. In this paper we look at the various dimensions of design and at current and past definitions to see the contemporary understanding of the subject as we see it today with the aid of models that the author has evolved over several years of reflection and research. We then trace the evolution of design as a natural human activity and restate this history in terms of the major stages of evolution from its origins in the use of fire and tools through the development of mobility, agriculture, symbolic expression, crafts production and on to industrial production and beyond to the information and knowledge products of the day. This sets the stage to ponder about the future of the activity and of the discipline as we see it today.

Ethical by Design

Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics 2017

This paper presents a collection of 'ethical by design' principles for considering ethical aspects in the design and implementation of technology-based products and services. It is a work-inprogress describing the need for new, innovative concepts and approaches in ethical design-based thinking. The paper argues that design thinking should and can be 'ethical by design'; that designs should strive to go beyond the ethical guidelines that are set by regulatory bodies and other such governance. This manifesto of 'ethical by design' principles is intended to support developers, providers, and users in the collaborative process of inherently and explicitly including ethics into product and service design.

An/Aesth/Ethics: the ethical potential of design

Design is often thought of as an activity seeking to change existing situations into preferred ones (Simon, 1969). But how are designers to discern what the nature of this “preferred” change should be? What would it mean to truly design ethically? In the admirable but naïve quest to improve situations through design, it is possible to end up bypassing the ethical altogether. Design can aesthetically provide the appearance and sensation of ethicality without the inconvenience of actually having to be ethical. Ethical discomfort is anaesthetised through the process of aestheticizing ethics: an/aestheticization. Beginning with visual communication design, but maintaining a view to the applicability and importance of the argument for broader fields of design, this paper presents the case that there is hope for genuinely ethical design in an increasingly aestheticized world by drawing on German philosopher of aesthetics Wolfgang Welsch’s suggestion that the root of ethics can be found to emerge from within the aesthetic itself. Design, which for so long has been a principal contributor to an/aestheticization, contains within itself - precisely due its aesthetic nature - the potential to return feeling to a society which finds itself constantly numbed to true ethical being.

Hand-Head-Heart-Ethics in Design_Istanbul_2009

Surveying the Landscape of Ethics-Focused Design Methods

arXiv (Cornell University), 2021

Over the past decade, HCI researchers, design researchers, and practitioners have increasingly addressed ethics-focused issues through a range of theoretical, methodological and pragmatic contributions to the field. While many forms of design knowledge have been proposed and described, we focus explicitly on knowledge that has been codified as "methods, " which we define as structured supports for everyday work practices of designers. In this paper, we identify, analyze, and map a collection of 63 existing ethics-focused methods intentionally designed for ethical impact. Building on results of a content analysis of these methods, we contribute a descriptive record of how these methods operationalize ethics, their intended audience or context of use, their "core" or "script, " and the means by which these methods are formulated and codified. Building on these results, we provide an initial definition of ethics-focused methods, identifying potential opportunities for the development of future methods to support ethical design practice. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Interaction design process and methods; • Social and professional topics → Codes of ethics.

The implicit ethics of designing

Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD4) 2015 Symposium. Banff, Canada, September 1-3, 2015., 2015

The relationship between ethics and design is most usually thought of in terms of applied ethics. There are, however, difficulties with this: for instance, conventional ethical stances such as deontology or consequentialism depend on procedures (predefined rules, optimisation) that are inapplicable in the sorts of complex situations which designers commonly face. In any case, it is not as if ethics is a settled body of theory that can act as an authority with which to guide practice. Depending on which theories we refer to, we receive different, and often directly conflicting, guidance. Paralleling the idea that design has its own epistemological foundations, rather than needing to import ideas from science, I propose an alternative way to think of the relation between design and ethics, looking to (1) the ethical questioning implicit in what designers do, and (2) the similarities between those situations which they encounter as a matter of course and those questions with which normative ethics is both most concerned and confused. I suggest that we might reason about ethical questions in design in design's own terms and, also, that rather than apply ethical theory to design we explore what design can contribute to ethics, inverting the more usual hierarchy. Design and ethics The relationship between ethics and design is most usually thought of in terms of applied ethics—as the application of normative ethical theories to design practice, for instance in terms of questions about agency, professional ethics or our relationship to technology or the environment. There are, however, difficulties with this. Firstly, as with any instance of applying theories to design that are external to it, what is special about design itself can become obscured. Secondly, it implies that ethical considerations are external to design questions, a view that can lead to seeing ethics as conflicting with design, either as an amelioration of design ideas or a radical innovation. In any case, it is not as if ethics is a settled body of theory that can be straightforwardly treated as an authority with which to guide practice: depending which theories or ideas we refer to, we receive different, and often directly conflicting, guidance as to what to do. There are parallels between this and the relationship between design and science. With the exhaustion of the attempt to provide a rational basis for design through the application of the scientific method, usually referred to as the Design Methods Movement, Nigel Cross, John Naughton and David Walker (1981) argued that, given what they identified as a state of epistemological chaos in science at that time (following critiques such as those of Paul Feyerabend, 1975/1993), scientific method was not a fruitful basis for design. Similarly, while we may wish to treat ethical philosophy as authoritative, it is unstable as a point of reference. As Terry Eagleton (2003, p. 229) has noted, we might expect to agree on general principles and diverge on particulars, yet we have no common view on many everyday ethical questions. Even with those questions where we have widespread agreement over an action being ethically good or bad, there is little agreement on why this is the case. Whether this state of disagreement is understood as a conflict between objective goods (Berlin, 1958/1998), an inevitable property of our subjectivity (Sartre, 1948) or as resulting from the dissipation of any overall idea of the good life with which to make different goods commensurable (MacIntyre, 1981/1985), the situation in which we find ourselves is that anything to which we refer to help clarify an ethical

Wicked ethics in Design

Wicked problems are wicked because, amongst other things, understanding problems as existing in society, at the intersection of many possible points of views held by a variety of potential stakeholders introduces indeterminacy. Ethical frameworks in this context may also be multiple and may exist in harmony or dis-harmony alongside each other. In this paper, we argue for an acknowledgement of this complexity. This acknowledgement includes recognizing a distinction between successful and good design; that design, when considering the best course of action in an ethical and pragmatic sense needs to look beyond the business and consumer dichotomy; that ethical pluralism can exist across multiple stakeholders in an ecosystem; and that our ethical judgements need to be considered within the context of socio-cultural change. This paper concludes by suggesting a range of interventions and tools that could be incorporated into design curriculum to assist design students with understanding and navigating ethical complexity.

Ethical design: a foundation for visual communication (original) (raw)

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