Topic: Engaging Values and Ethics through Design and Design Futuring
When: March 3, 2022 16:00–17:00 GMT
Growing public discussions, regulations, and worker actions call for greater consideration of social values and ethics during technology development. This talk discusses several relationships between design and ethics—design as a form of labor to address ethical issues, design as ethical intervention and provocation, and design as research method and reflective practice.
I report on qualitative research studying North American user experience (UX) professionals at large technology companies who see addressing social values as part of their work practice. While they attend to values as a part of everyday UX work, they also engage in activities aimed at re-shaping their organizations. They sometimes engage in tactics of soft resistance, seeking to subvert existing practices towards more values-conscious ends while maintaining legibility as conducting business-as-usual within the organization. I also discuss how design fiction and speculative design approaches were used as forms of research engagement in this project—as a research method to prompt critical reflection on issues related to privacy and surveillance, and as an analytical method to analyze and reflect on the qualitative data (“design fiction memos”). This talk suggests new ways to consider values and ethics as a part of design futuring, research, and practice.
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