Creative Ethics From Design x Philosophy of Technology

The call for imagining and achieving better futures through design immediately poses the question ‘what is better?’. The answer to that question is where design ethics comes in. However, with a classical top-down approach, doing ethics may be perceived as restrictive, a burden that slows down the creative process. This paper therefore proposes a bottom-up approach to addressing ethical issues in design practice. Rooted in the practical turn in the philosophy of technology, the approach is called ‘Creative Ethics’. This means doing ethics in a creative way, leading to creative results. The paper illustrates the approach with a set of design cases from design education, which are all about gender neutral toilet facilities. In conclusion, creative ethics is proposed as a way of exploring how we want (and do not want) to live -through design. A process through which we can subsequently envision – and reflect upon –more preferable futures.