Surveying a Landscape of Ethics-Focused Design Methods

Abstract

Over the past decade, HCI researchers and practitioners have increasingly addressed ethics-focused issues through a range of theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic contributions to the field. While many forms of design knowledge have been proposed and described, we focus explicitly on knowledge that has been codified as “methods,” which we define as structured supports for everyday work practices of designers. In this paper, we identify, analyze, and map a collection of 63 existing methods intentionally designed for ethical impact. Building on results of a content analysis of these methods, we contribute a descriptive record of how these methods operationalize ethics, their intended audience or context of use, their “core” or “script,” and the means by which these methods are formulated and codified. Building on these results, we provide an initial definition of ethics-focused methods, identifying potential opportunities for the development of future methods to support ethical design practice.