Ethics for Designers

Abstract

To this end, the central aim of this research has been to explore ways for designers to incorporate ethics into their design process. A practice-based research methodology has been employed, with research methods including interviews, case studies and observations. A range of case studies has been executed at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. Various techniques based on current ethical decision making tools and design methods have been experimented with. The insights gained throughout the project are boiled down into an accessible framework of how designers can cope with ethical issues within design. The argument put forth in this research is that the development of skills allows for incorporation of ethics because skills are not limited to specific content. The proposed ethical skills for designers are moral sensitivity, moral creativity and moral advocacy. Building on the theoretical framework, a toolkit for designers to acquire and develop these ethical skills has been developed. The tools are grouped in relation to the three ethical skills. These tools include: an evaluative exercise inspired by the ‘script’ concept of Latour; an ethical framing tool to define ethical constraints and provide an overview of the designers’ responsibilities; an ethical ideation game based on brainwriting and hidden roles, which stimulates integrating values into design; a role-playing tool to uncover and experience potential unethical situations and to improve a design; a practical introduction to normative ethics; a mapping tool based on the concept of Value Sensitive Design and a tool to set ethical objectives and divide responsibilities among stakeholders. Each tool is focused on a different aspect of the design process, ranging from the deconstruction of previous work to ideation to communication with stakeholders. Thus allowing the tools to find their natural place within an existing design process. Finally, these tools have been evaluated with designers in practice. However, to fully validate the effect of the toolkit each tool should be evaluated in real life design projects. In addition, these tools can be used to investigate the effect of practically incorporating ethics into design projects.