Premise of the Ethics in Design Showcase

The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum regularly curates exhibits of design across all different design disciplines and industries. Many of their curations frequently feature various ways that designers, developers, and manufacturers incorporate different ethical considerations into their work. For example, they hosted an exhibit on “Why Design Now?” that centered around how “doing good” can be translated into tangible artifacts, physical spaces, processes, and other design activities and artifacts. That exhibit included examples such as the Cabbage Chair where the designer incorporated comfort, aesthetics, and environmental considerations into the design and manufacturing process. Another exhibit focused on the principle of dignity in healthcare design, and as part of that they published a book on how hospital design can foster (or interfere with) dignity for patients. As yet another example, the museum itself developed Design at Home, an activity book aimed at increasing “educational equity in communities with less access to digital tools and platforms” (McNally, 2020, para. 1). The design of the book drew explicitly on principles of universal design, aiming to reach multi-generational audiences, and explicitly constrained the design process and artifacts to require no internet connection or special materials and be usable and applicable for different age groups. The museum’s collections are an inspirational starting point for how we can think about ethics in the instructional design and technology discipline and start to share our designs with each other as a form of knowledge building.

Design is a useful theory of action that can help us translate critical ethical, social, political, and cultural considerations into parameters and constraints that inform our design processes and artifacts. Design is also a visionary activity through which we can begin to image and construct alternate or desired futures. Simon (1969) defined design as being concerned with how things ought to be, and the designer is one who devises a course of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. Page (1966) defined design as an imaginative jump from present facts to future possibilities. Asimow (1962) described design a purposeful activity that is directed toward the goal of fulfilling human needs. And Weisbord (1992) described design as a way of resolving basic human conflicts to iterate towards a desirable human future. Inherent in design is a sense of imagination and creative possibilities.

Although ethics are typically framed in cognitive terms (knowing and understanding different philosophical approaches) or affective terms (e.g. caring feelings), it is actually considered part of the little-studied conative domain that focuses on will, volition, intention, and choice. Design similarly reflects will, volition, intention and choice, and is even considered a synonym for conation (Design and Conation, 2016). Design is the act of exerting our will – where we may bring our knowledge (cognition) and our feelings (affective) to bear on problems and needs but with the primary intent of translating knowing and feeling into action, or into “doing.” Gray summarizes the relationship between design and ethics nicely when he states “design is an ethical act” (2023, para. 3). As such, design is value-laden, and the artifacts of that process are inscribed and etched with the values, beliefs and dispositions that designers explicitly and implicitly embed (Gray & Boling, 2016). Ethics as design reflects an intentionality of incorporating non-technical and non-pedagogical considerations more explicitly to lean on technologies through the acts of learning design, technology selection, and technology implementation. Moore et al. (in press) use an analogy to wrought iron to describe technology as wrought into shape by artistry or effort, depicting the work that we as designers and learning professionals do as we fold ethical and other considerations into our work with various technologies.

In this exhibit, we seek sessions that illuminate that work – both through examples of artifacts and processes as well as a discussion on how you as a designer or your team of individuals incorporated or confronted ethical considerations and dimensions. This involves a frank discussion on what challenges you encountered and an honest discussion of conflicting constraints or demands and how you navigated those. While every design situation features ethical dimensions, in some contexts these may play a more critical role in team dynamics, the process, and/or the products or artifacts resulting from the work. Sometimes, designers are explicit and intentional in addressing considerations. Other times, ethical issues arise in the course of a project or design and cause a designer to adjust or reframe.

Examples of design cases that highlight ethical issues and tensions in design work are Gallup et al. (2018) on empowerment in the design of homecare worker training and Steele et al. (2018) on designing accessible maker spaces and conflicting needs for user groups that they encountered in that project. As you consider whether to propose for this strand, we recommend you read those (links below) to see how the designer-authors illuminate conflicting values or needs and how they detail the complex aspects of their projects without offering simplistic or tidy solutions. This is the discourse we seek to facilitate on design practices as designers navigate complex and often conflicting values, interests and priorities.