Research project Design Ethics in Practice
The way that technology is designed affects both people and the planet. Therefore, we need to prioritize the ethical dimensions of technology and develop practices for ethical design. This project explores ethical design practices together with design practitioners.
Digital products and services shape our society and have led to significant progress but also major problems, such as screen addiction, privacy issues, exclusion and overconsumption. Therefore, ethical technology design has become an increasingly important issue in the field of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research.
Despite this growing interest, there remains a notable gap in understanding how designers perceive ethics in design. Given that professional roles like UX designers, service designers, and developers wield considerable influence over technology design, it is imperative to explore their perspectives.
This need for exploration is underscored by the limited adoption of ethical guidelines and research findings in practical design contexts. For these reasons, it is important to include designers in research to examine their perspectives and ensure a more relevant and useful application of ethical design practice.
This research constitutes Sharon Lindberg’s PhD thesis work, supervised by Ola Knutsson and Chiara Rossitto.
Project description
Design of technology is not neutral but affects what people can do and who is able to do what. In other words, design has ethical dimensions. Researchers in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and related fields have been interested in this in various ways for over 30 years, which has resulted in a multitude of theoretical frameworks, principles, manifestos and methods.
However, these are hardly used in practice. Designers say that this is due, among other things, to the fact that the research results do not line up with how things work in practice and therefore they are not very useful.
This project investigates how designers in different professional roles (UX designers, service designers, developers, etc.) active in digital design relate to and understand ethics, what challenges exist for ethical design, and how ethics can be cultivated in design practice. The goal of the project is to find ways forward that are grounded in how designers themselves perceive their reality, their role, and their agency.
The project aims to provide insight into the ethical life-worlds of technology designers and present practice-based insights and points of departure for:
1. researchers who want to promote ethics in design practice,
2. educators who want to teach design ethics in a way that aligns with how design practitioners think and do ethics in professional life, and
3. designers who strive to improve the ethics of design practice.
Project members
Project managers
Sharon Lindberg
Research assistant
Ola Knutsson
Universitetslektor
Chiara Rossitto
Senior lecturer
Members
Petter Karlström
Universitetslektor
Sirkku Männikkö Barbutiu
Utbildningsledare
Publications
More about this project
The Design Ethics Workshop
This workshop provides a space and structure for exploring and becoming ethical together. By doing this, participants can create common visions of what ethically responsible design means and how to get there. The workshop is intended to be simple and easily adaptable, to fit with design practice, to foster curiosity and collaboration around ethics, and to kick-start the cultivation of more ethical design based on matters that participants themselves understand and care about.
“Sparking Conversations” – a design brief for cultivating ethics in design
Design briefs are commonly used in design practice by groups/teams, collaboratively unpacking the problem and solution space. This brief is thus a familiar format but in an unfamiliar realm – the realm of ethics. It asks the question “How might we raise awareness of ethically responsible design?”