Design and Ethics
Design and Ethics (D&E) is a subgroup of Service Design Melbourne (SDM), Australia, that aims to create a space for community to enable conversations on ethical, tricky and discomforting issues in depth and scale from the practical to the philosophical, that emerge when designing with and for people. It aims to encourage learning, listening, mentoring, companionship, stewardship and advocacy. Like SDM, D&E are organised by a group of passionate and generous volunteers who, since 2017, organised small to large, local, physical gatherings that ranged from reading groups, panel discussion, social meet-ups, facilitated workshops and public talks. Reflections from these events can be read on the other Medium posts (see the list below). These gatherings are led by the volunteering D&E committee at a particular time who invite guests and facilitators to choose a topic, approach and outcomes. The D&E series have grown to become a regular feature of SDM reflecting the community’s appetite for such gatherings in a growing profession that was deploying methods and approaches too unproblematically under the ‘human-centred’ mantra. There is also a vibrant D&E Slack channel with approximately 400 ‘members’, where we can share resources, offer support and discuss topics of mutual interest. The posts on the Slack channels by the community often catalyses ideas and discussion for the D&E committee, which have led to many events in the past.
One initiative D&E is exploring is to draw out insights, discussions and resources that bubbled up through D&E Slack and curate that in a Medium post. This serves a pragmatic purpose to house key discussions and resources, generously shared by D&E community, that inevitably disappears from the channel after 6 months. ‘Archiving’ the discussions on Medium under D&E is one way we hope to offer self-directed learning resources for the SDM community and beyond, on issues that are emerging as important for ethical design practices. Resources for these issues can often be scarce and we would like to continue promoting multi-vocal dialogues around them. Through this curation and shared reflections we hope to build, and seed further reflections and discussions on topics that concern the community. This work is as much about unfolding our processes of engagement as well as the content with which we are engaging.
The Medium pieces are an outcome of consent granted by the individuals, whose posts have been featured. Our editorial voice is woven in and out among various other voices here. We show how conversations and various perspectives shape both the organising of D&E events and to see possible learnings that emerges from these meaty dialogues. We welcome the questions around the ethics of how we do this curatorial, archival initiative. When relocating posts from a semi-private D&E group to a public platform like Medium, we have sought permission from each individual whose posts are featured, allowing them the choice to decline or remain anonymous. We must also be reflexive in attending to the unforeseen impacts of this activity and continually be in dialogue with the authors and community about this work. Please feel free to raise any concerns with Yoko Akama @ RMIT (2021 D&E member) if you have anything you’d like to discuss.
