Ethics, Values and Culture Symposium

Abstract

This half-day symposium at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE), TU Delft, explores ethics, values, and culture in design research and education across IDE's three departments: Human-Centered Design (HCD), Strategic Product Design (SDE), and Design for Interaction & Social Innovation (DOS). The program features four 20-minute presentations of four IDE researchers (Özkaramanll, Colombo, Secomandi and Singh) from the three departments, followed by Q&A and a final panel moderated by Tassinari, addressing Design Anthropology for Social Change; Design under Pressure: Exploring the Tensions in Design Ethics; Designing for Mutual Recognition and Human Freedom; and Designing Feminist AI: Towards Inclusivity and Empowerment. An accompanying exhibition of provotypes, developed by approximatively 400 master students, creates a material dialogue with researchers. The symposium is conceived as a dialogic and generative space of encounter and co-creation, engaging researchers, educators, PhD candidates, and students, aiming to generate internal discussion within IDE, strengthening the dialogue across the departments on the ethical and political implications of its ongoing design research and pedagogy and connecting it to the international design community through PDC Places. By hosting this event, IDE creates a plural, reflexive space that acknowledges the entanglements of design with patriarchal, colonial, and anthropocentric frameworks while exploring embodied, feminist, and decolonial ways of knowing, practicing, and teaching design, inviting participants to collectively reimagine what it means to do and teach design otherwise.