Ethics works! Here’s how to use it to come up with better ideas

Imagine you receive an assignment with a list of requirements you have to meet with your solution. Once you come up with your idea, an ethical consideration is added to the list. Now, what adjustments to your idea will be necessary to meet the new requirements?

The paragraph above describes the core idea of a workshop my colleagues and I organized at the WebExpo 2021 conference. We wanted to draw attention to the fact that client briefs rarely mention ethics these days — despite the fact that explicit ethical requirements can improve the final outcome significantly.

Playful exploration of what ethics means. Literally

For the purposes of our workshop, we took advantage of 2 existing serious card games. By combining the two decks, we deliberately designed our workshop in a way that highlights the difference ethics can make to a solution.

In the first step, we used cards from the game The Thing From The Future by Situation Lab.

First, we presented the participants with a set of 4 cards that described a possible future and asked them, without referencing ethics in any way, to quickly come up with a description of a thing from the future and how it worked so it matched what the cards said.

In the second step, we used cards from the game Moral Agent (MA) by Jet Gispen.

After shortly discussing the solutions, we added a fifth card to the assignment that introduced an ethical topic (e.g. privacy, accessibility, curiosity…), along with some examples of challenges that designers might face as a result of considering such a topic.

This twist made the participants reconsider their initial ideas and prompted them to adjust their solutions accordingly.

Learning by doing resulted in many useful insights

At the end, we discussed our adjusted solutions and shared our thoughts about the role ethics can play in the design process. Here are some points we agreed on:

1. Introducing ethical criteria to the brief helps with clarifying the vision and purpose of a product or service.
2. Ethical considerations should be present throughout the design process, not just at the beginning.
3. Not just designers, but also developers, analysts and engineers should participate in this kind of workshops to get a better idea about the impact of their work.
4. Ethics is a broad field that can be applied in many contexts. What values and topics to consider is a decision that should reflect the values and topics of the most affected stakeholders — which presupposes a thorough knowledge of who might be affected by the proposed solution in the first place.
5. Whether ethical considerations will bring about the desired outcomes is often hard to test in a sandbox mode or on a small sample since the outcomes often depend on the way people interact with the solution in the real world at scale.
6. Different societies subscribe to different sets of values which might affect what is considered ethical and/or responsible. This might be yet another challenge for companies that operate globally.

What would you add to the list? And how do you include ethical considerations to your workflow? Share your tips in the comments or email me at matej@pabeni.cz. Thanks!

Check out this Miro board if you're interested in what the outcome of the workshop might look like.

The workshop turned out great. All participants took up the challenge head on, came up with some great ideas and contributed with many interesting points about ethics in the design process — while having fun.

You, too, can have fun with your team while exploring such a delicate topic as ethics. We encourage you to try it! Here’s what to do:

Step by step guide to the workshop

The workshop is intended for a group of 3–6 people. One session lasts about 2 hours. It can be played on-site as well as online.

1/ Download, print and cut up the cards

• The Thing From The Future
• Moral Agent

2/ Create a group of 3–6 people

If there are more people, split up into groups. We did the workshop divided into 3 on-site groups and 1 online group (using a Miro board and Zoom). Each group had its own facilitator. All groups met for a discussion at the end.

3/ Start with a warm up activity

Ask the group: If you had an all-knowing mirror, what question about the future would have you asked it? Give everybody a minute or two and then have them all present their answer one by one.

4/ Set up the creative prompt

Using Arc, Terrain, Object and Mood cards from The Thing From The Future deck. Make sure you understand the meaning of each card.

• This activity is deliberately speculative. It is much easier to analyze a hypothetical example than a real world company or product in the next step.

5/ Ideate

In 15 minutes, come up with a description of the thing from the future that matches what the cards say.

• TIP: You can use De-scription canvas. In that case make sure everybody fills in just the first two rows (What, How).

6/ Discuss

After the first round, have a brief discussion and present your ideas to each other.

• TIP: It helps the discussion if each participant gives a name to their thing.

7/ Add a card from the Moral Agent and ideate again

Add a card from the Moral Agent deck to the creative prompt. In 15 minutes, try to adjust your description of the thing from the future to fit the new set of requirements.

• If you used De-scription canvas in the first round, make sure this time everybody fills in also the third row (Why).

8/ Discuss and reflect on your experience

After the second round, present the adjusted ideas to each other and have a discussion centered around the question: What can we do to make sure our solutions do no harm? Write down interesting points and present them at the end of the session.

And that’s it!
Hope it went well and you uncovered some useful insights or perhaps even a direction for further inquiry.