SCAFFOLDING SOLUTION-ORIENTED ETHICAL DESIGN REFLECTION

The Human-centred Design (HCD) standard has been the foundation for designing interactive systems since the 1980s, inspiring commonly adopted design and development approaches. However, it questioned whether HCD alone can address today’s complex societal challenges. Critics highlight that individual user needs may conflict with collective or long-term goals, prompting a shift toward ethics-focused design approaches such as Value-sensitive Design and Humanity-centred Design. This “ethics turn” in design education encourages students to follow a human-centered approach and account for a broader set of stakeholders, including non-users, manufacturing chain actors, and more than human entities like ’the environment’ or ‘nature’. Although we share the concerns addressed by these authors, in this paper, we argue that such approaches are insufficient for ethics-focused design education because they do not help students recognize the ethical dimensions of concrete design decisions, such as identifying design choices that may reify social norms. We focus on a case study on designing digital tools for democratic participation that are more inclusive to underrepresented groups of adolescents in the Netherlands. We use the case to illustrate how ethics-focused methods require a type of reflection that may not be conveyed easily in design education. We feel, however, that it can be scaffolded through a playing field analysis, which encourages students to identify tensions between playing fields of design: technology, humans, organizations, society, and design. This approach may represent a step towards acknowledging these tensions and recognizing the ethical consequences of practical design choices.