About

The introduction, development, and implementation of emerging digital technologies such as self- driving cars or digital assistants have raised questions of bias and discrimination, surveillance and social control, power and privacy in technology development among others. Within academia and industry alike, these questions are addressed from an ethical standpoint that is predominantly regulatory, often centered on harm reduction. Ethics is mainly called on to set boundaries around what is otherwise seen as broadly a neutral or beneficial enterprise. In other words, what goes under the umbrella term of ethics is conveniently centered on mitigating risk and controlling demonstrable and obvious harms as opposed to asking more fundamental and nuanced questions: should this technology be developed at all? by and for whom? in what form? and to what purpose? The example of bias in algorithms is illustrative here: it is all too common to complain about bias in algorithms, especially in facial recognition algorithms that fail at recognizing women of color because of the datasets that dominantly feature white men. However, given the dominant uses of this technology in profiling and surveillance, we must question whether the fixation on bias reduction is overshadowing other ethical concerns and issues.

The regulatory model of ethics is arguably dire for design and engineering practice. It leads to the prevailing—albeit tacit—presupposition that ethics is a form of policing or is altogether disingenuous. Practitioners who are seriously and genuinely concerned about ethics in their practices are left to their own moral judgements to guide their professional work. Even worse, the problem of ethics is construed as a matter of personal responsibility. Students and professionals often ask for recommendations on what may be the “right” theory that they can adopt and commit to so they can then “apply,” it, much like a recipe, if and when necessary. As a result, efforts to imbue design and engineering with ethics run the risk of assuming that advancing social justice is a matter of the power and/or commitment of dedicated individuals. But individual power and commitment, while necessary, are not sufficient for advancing social justice. Unconditional convictions are quick to turn into dogma. Somewhat paradoxically, ethical convictions and commitments can prove to be as bad as no ethics at all by working to fit experience to theory as opposed allowing experience to inform what may be a relevant and productive ethical theory, let alone serving as an occasion to revisit and refine theory. 

Ethical discourse and analysis, however, does not have to remain in the realm of regulation. In fact, pragmatic and feminist ethical theory positions it as an imaginative domain of inquiry that can re-orient how we frame and address technical problems. In this way, ethical thinking is well-aligned with design thinking in its orientation toward transforming existing situations to preferred ones. The challenge is to equip both individuals, groups, and organizations (i.e., interdisciplinary collectives of engineers, designers, policymakers, etc) with analytical tools and frameworks of ethics in ways that would enable them to see what the horizon of possibility is in their specific domain of practice and to devise collective strategies that begin to define and address ethical issues as they arise in their practice.

To address the above challenge, this website hosts a series of storied and conversational strategies (such as cases and scenarios) that aim to collectively help researchers, engineers, and designers:

1. understand key ethical concepts such as the differences between values and preferences
2. identify and articulate dominant values in a design project
3. identify alternate values (or alternate manifestations of the previously identified values) that could potentially reframe the spectrum of aims and possibilities
4. anticipate and discuss the disagreements that arise due to differences in values
5. devise alternate courses of action that reflect and address such differences of values

The website is part of a larger media/educational strategy that aims to support researchers integrating ethical thinking into their day-to-day practices. It is informed by the research work of Dr. Nassim Parvin and the Design and Social Justice Studio and builds on a framework of values reflective of the inherent pluralism that characterizes ethics.