Abstract
Ethics is complex and situated, involving many stakeholders that impact the design of technology systems. Numerous methods and tools have been proposed to enable practitioners to address ethical issues in the workplace. However, little work has described how designers themselves understand and seek to respond to that ethical complexity. In this short paper, we present five transformation structures that visually and relationally depict how ethics might be addressed in a workplace setting. We base these structures on analysis of plans that 39 practitioners and students created in a co-design workshop to address an ethical concern in their job role. We evaluated the diagrams of these workshop plans and identified five different types of structures that could lead to potential transformation of ethical practices: parallel, linear, top-down, loopy, and gordian. We identify how these transformation structures differently inscribe expectations of ethical mediation and action, leading to opportunities for further support of ethical practices by practitioners.
Keywords
ethical mediation; design ethics; design methods; ethical design complexity
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.178
Citation
Sai Chivukula, S., and M. Gray, C. (2024) Envisioning transformation structures to support ethical mediation practices, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.178
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Envisioning transformation structures to support ethical mediation practices
Ethics is complex and situated, involving many stakeholders that impact the design of technology systems. Numerous methods and tools have been proposed to enable practitioners to address ethical issues in the workplace. However, little work has described how designers themselves understand and seek to respond to that ethical complexity. In this short paper, we present five transformation structures that visually and relationally depict how ethics might be addressed in a workplace setting. We base these structures on analysis of plans that 39 practitioners and students created in a co-design workshop to address an ethical concern in their job role. We evaluated the diagrams of these workshop plans and identified five different types of structures that could lead to potential transformation of ethical practices: parallel, linear, top-down, loopy, and gordian. We identify how these transformation structures differently inscribe expectations of ethical mediation and action, leading to opportunities for further support of ethical practices by practitioners.