CN19 - Ethics through Design

Conveners: Malé Luján Escalante, Monika Buscher, Katrina Petersen, Catherine Easton, & Hayley Alter

Everything is becoming datafied. Research and Innovation, particularly in the public services, face new ethical tensions as they balance movement of data across sectors, cultures, countries, categories. The tensionsshould be proactively addressed in the design process. The challenge is that ethics is not a ‘thing’ you can design into a tool or into data. Ethics are enacted, in use. This conversation focuses on building up a method to conduct Ethics through Design (EtD). EtD builds on participatory methods and collaborative design processes to make visible and approachable the complexities of ethical, legal, and social tensions that emerge in datafication. The aim is a move from thinking of ethics as a barrier to innovation towards ethics as contextual, contested, on-going process that offers challenges and novel opportunities for design. EtD aims to discuss privacy impact assessments required when designing for data processing. This is an open invitation to designers with interest in ‘doing’ ethics to discuss feasibilities, challenges and opportunities of EtD as a framework.

Click here for full Conversation details.