Ethical practice requires thinking beyond the already known, being open in the moment of the encounter, pausing at thresholds and crossing over. Ethical practice is emergent in encounters with others, in emergent listening with others, including non-human others. It is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think. Ethics is emergent in the intra-active encounters in which knowing, being and doing (epistemology, ontology and ethics) are inextricably entangled.
Davies, Bronwyn. “Ethics and the New Materialism: A Brief Genealogy of the ‘Post’ Philosophies in the Social Sciences.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 39, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 113–27
Design & Ethics teamed up with Paper Giant to deliver the Ethical Practice stream at SDNOW4 last week. We were happy to welcome such a kind and generous group of practitioners into our three day, three-course meal of ethics in practice. Starting with the entree, we asked people to share and reflect with one another on how they arrived, what they need to feel comfortable and what they might do to help others feel comfortable. We hoped to create a safe and supportive space for inviting the discomfort that often arises when critically reflecting on ethics and practice. Our group was a testament to the capacity for care in the service design community here in Melbourne: hard questions were asked and all answers were generously considered. We finished the day brimming with confidence that the group of people were sharing the next few days with were exactly the people we needed.
The main course was delivered in our Friday workshop and focused on a tasting menu of frameworks design practitioners have built to support ethical practice. This included the Australian Indigenous Design Charter, the Equity-Centered Community Design framework and Paper Giant’s Ethical Research framework. With each of these frameworks we asked participants to understand a value or way of seeing the world that is core to practicing ethically, and might run counter to how you normally operate. For the Australian Indigenous Design Charter we introduced the Charter in its entirety, and then highlighted the charter’s first principle: “Indigenous led: Ensure Indigenous representation creation in design practice is Indigenous led.” Participants were asked to reflect on how the community with which they work might be allowed to lead the work. And more importantly, what they might need to give up about their own ways of working in order to allow that shift in leadership to occur.
The Equity-Centered Community Design framework focuses on how we might use the design process to dismantle systemic oppression. Participants in the workshop were asked to walk through Creative Reaction Lab’s Unfolding History exercise to be given an experience of different understandings and ‘facts’ around the same event, and become more aware of the systemic erasure of non-dominant narratives. This was highlighted through a recent event in Melbourne in which the state of Victoria approved the building of a flagship Apple store in Federation Square, which was later blocked by heritage authorities. While many people in the room were familiar with this news story, few had seen in mainstream media that the Yarra Building that would have been destroyed for the Apple store to be built was home of the Koorie Heritage Trust, a 30-year-old Aboriginal owned and managed non-profit.
The last framework introduced to participants was the Paper Giant Ethical Research Framework. This research-specific framework creates spaces and positions in a project for you as a practitioner to consistently ask yourself, “Am I okay with this?”. It is focused on understanding and being explicit with yourself about the kinds of ethical decisions and tradeoffs you might be making through project work. We also delivered a few case studies of the framework in action; hopefully it is as useful to others as it has been to us.
Saturday’s workshop, the dessert of the stream, was participant-led, lightly-facilitated and designed as complementary to Friday’s main course. We provided participants with a diverse smorgasbord of found and bought materials as a tool for individual self-reflection including organic and inorganic materials of varying colours, textures, weights and shapes. Participants were challenged to develop and explore their own ‘vocabulary of materials’ as one option for reflecting on their experiences, values and questions of a personal project, and the conference as a whole, in turn accessing tacit and latent knowledge about their own design practice.
After many months of putting this stream together, D&E hopes to build on this work as we continue to try and support ethical practice in our community. Some of what was introduced calls for longer, more in-depth engagements in order to fully encounter and digest what was highlighted in our menu. In the coming months we will be reflecting and sharing with the community in more depth about the stories and experiences of this event.
