Design Ethics and Ethical Designing
Pervasive digitalization provides lots of opportunities for providing new services and making the lives of people and organizations better, easier, and more flexible. At the same time the constant availability of users, the proliferation of surveillance devices, such as drones and video cameras, and the often-questionable use of services in our phones, computers, and networks, which has led Zuboff to coin the term “surveillance capitalism” to describe the phenomenon.
How does this concern us as designers of digital services? When we design systems, we should be informed about the goals of the systems, and we should understand the effects of the designs on users and the society at large. As the systems become more powerful and interconnected, quite mundane decisions about data collection and data sharing can be by accident or by design really powerful tools for bad actors.
In the lecture, I will give examples of risks presented by design decisions and I will try to give tools for analyzing the possible ethical risks of designs and guidelines for action when there are ethical dilemmas in design work.
Lecture at NEMO2024
Date/Time: Thursday, July 25, 2024 at 09:00