New Adventures in Responsible Innovation
Introducing the Design Ethics publication
The charge
As a design professor, I teach my students to find, understand, and solve complex problems. I equip them with tools for conducting research, analyzing information, generating ideas, creating prototypes, and implementing their solutions. At the end of my courses — if I’ve done my job — my students feel confident and empowered to go out into the world and make a real impact. But what kind of impact are they making?
My colleagues and I have an easy (aspirational) answer: positive impact, of course. We would never, nor would our students, claim to have the desire (or even the willingness) to perpetrate harm. We want the efforts of our students to lead to better (i.e., more just, more sustainable, more joyful) futures for all. We want our students to do good.
Fair enough. The trouble starts when the definitions of what is “good” inevitably get murky — or, as is often the case, when our students have to choose between competing goods.
Should you create a device that measurably improves the well-being of millions of people, if the production of that device harms the environment?
Should you design a platform that allows important social movements to form and grow, if that platform also leads to a mental health crisis for an entire generation of young people?
These questions lie in the domain of ethics. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with morals and values in decision-making — and my contention is that we, as design educators, must commit more seriously to incorporating it into our curricula.
A new course
For the first time this spring, I’m teaching a new course at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College, called “Design Ethics.” My partner, Kate Nolfi—who is a philosophy professor at the University of Vermont—and I developed it together.
Here’s the course description:
This course integrates philosophical theorizing and design practice, exploring the moral, social, and environmental responsibilities of designers in, e.g., product design, engineering design, UI/UX design, and other related fields. Through readings, group discussions, case studies, guest speakers, and interactive exercises, students will learn to critically analyze and apply ethical principles in the context of design. Along the way, students will develop not only a deeper understanding of the role of design in shaping our world, but also the skills needed to become more thoughtful and responsible designers.
This course is open to all undergraduate students at the college: all class years, all majors. The only requirement is that they must first have taken one of several introductory design courses: I felt it was important for the students to have some first-hand familiarity with a design process before they can critique it.
Together, the students and I have spent this term learning about different ethical theories (consequentialism, deontology, contractarianism, feminist ethics, etc.), and applying them to different kinds of case studies in design.
Which is where this Medium publication comes in.
Highlighting student voices
This publication exists in order to share with the world the thoughts and journeys of the students taking the Design Ethics course at Dartmouth. Their final assignment started with these instructions:
For the culminating project in this course, you will write and publish a Medium article in which you present an original ethical analysis of a designed artifact (a physical or digital product or system).
You will identify an existing artifact and apply the ideas, concepts, and frameworks from ethical theory to analyze the ethics of its design, paying particular attention to the decisions designers made through the process of its creation, as well as its impact and consequences post-implementation. In addition to drawing upon the materials you have read in this course, you will further combine primary research (i.e., stakeholder interviews) with secondary research (i.e., literature review) to inform your insights.
The articles published here have all gone through a peer review process. The students worked in drafts, giving each other feedback on each stage of the writing process, and hosting symposia to work through their ideas in conversation. Together, they embarked into the complex and challenging terrain of ethical questions in design, investigating tricky tradeoffs and uncovering surprising insights.
And, while these students’ journeys continue from here, the articles offered in this publication present a snapshot of their explorations, and the culmination of several months of research and reflection. I hope that their words inspire you, teach you, and challenge you.
They certainly did that for me.
