Ethics and Values in Design: A Structured Review and Theoretical Critique

Abstract

A variety of approaches have appeared in academic literature and in design practice representing “ethics-first” methods. These approaches typically focus on clarifying the normative dimensions of design, or outlining strategies for explicitly incorporating values into design. While this body of literature has developed considerably over the last 20 years, two themes central to the endeavour of ethics and values in design (E + VID) have yet to be systematically discussed in relation to each other: (a) designer agency, and (b) the strength of normative claims informing the design process. To address this gap, we undertook a structured review of leading E + VID approaches and critiques, and classified them according to their positions on normative strength, and views regarding designer agency. We identified 18 distinct approaches and 13 critiques that met the inclusion criteria for our review. Included papers were distributed across the spectrum of views regarding normative strength, and we found that no approaches and only one critique represented a view characteristic of “low” designer agency. We suggest that the absence of “low” designer agency approaches results in the neglect of crucial influences on design as targets of intervention by designers. We conclude with suggestions for future research that might illuminate strategies to achieve ethical design in information mature societies, and argue that without attending to the tensions raised by balancing normatively “strong” visions of the future with limitations imposed on designer agency in corporate-driven design settings, “meaningful” ethical design will continue to encounter challenges in practice.

The Political Economy of Digital Health Equity: Structural Analysis

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Feminist value sensitive design of self-tracking technology based on female body data

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The Ethics of Agent-Based Social Simulation

“…This narrow understanding of the object of ethical regulation in the professional approach to computer simulation is not limited to standardisation, but is also present in some ethical compliance strategies. In recent years, 'design' approaches to ethics have become popular in computer science and engineering, especially for AI applications in social settings (Donia & Shaw 2021;European Commission 2021;IBM 2019). These methods and frameworks seek to prevent ethical issues either by purposefully intervening in the technological application itself (e.g., embedding morality in artificial agents Dignum et al 2018) or in the production process (e.g., by clarifying the normative dimensions of the process or by explicitly incorporating ethics-oriented principles, activities or subprocesses Donia & Shaw 2021).…”