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Ethics, design, and creativity

In the context of the designers responsibility for the impact of technology, ethical considerations are important. However, these considerations are often seen as limiting innovation and the freedom of the designer. Is it possible, on the contrary, that ethics can also foster creativity in design? The research project Tech-Wise is about a practice oriented approach in ethics; developing tools to engage people with ethical deliberation on the impact of technology. One result of the project is a workshop format for stimulating ethical deliberation that can be tailored to particular technologies and design disciplines. We argue from the results of one particular instance of this workshop format that such an approach to ethics has a fruitful reciprocal effect. It can stimulate creativity in design by enriching the question about the purpose of an innovation, and the other way around enrich ethical reasoning by opening up to often surprising impacts of technologies.

Ideological Platforms

Book review of: M. Pepi (2025). Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, Melville House, Brooklyn-London, 224 p.

Online Intimacy-The Digital Designed Self

Pervasive Labour Union #15

Welcome to the fourth special issue of the Pervasive Labour Union zine, Urgent Publishing Debris. In May 2019, the Making Public: Urgent Publishing Conference took place. Among others, it asked the following questions:-"How to realize sustainable, high-quality alternatives within this domain of post-digital publishing?"-"How can designers, developers, artists, writers and publishers intervene in the public debate and counter misinformation in a meaningful and relevant way?"-"What are new publishing strategies for our current media landscape?"-"How to design for urgency without succumbing to an accelerated hype cycle?"The presentations, debates and conversations have all been officially documented in blogposts on the Institute of Network Cultures website, videos and pictures. But what about the notes, the pictures, the recordings and the tweets of the conference's visitors? What do they have to tell us about how each person experienced the conference? This special issue aims to provide new readings of the event by creating remixes of the official archival sources with the 'unofficial' debris circulating around it.In order to facilitate the navigation between articles, making connections visible where they might have only been implicit, the editors have decided to define eleven overarching topics (Social/Community, Activism, Post-truth, New forms, Authorship/Makers, Speed, Positioning, Locality, Relationality, Authoritarianism, Parasite). Each of the topics was attributed a colour and the source material is highlighted accordingly.Furthermore, each remix has a dispersed editors' note, wherein each editor reflects in more detail on the program, how it connects to the conference's topic and how it might answer any of the aforementioned questions.

Res Publica ex Machina: On Neocybernetic Governance and the End of Politics

In 2017, Denmark sent the first digital ambassador, Casper Klynge, to Silicon Valley. The aim of this move of ‘techplomacy’ was, as Klynge explained, not simply to distribute greetings notes by the Danish queen. Rather, the intention was to ‘update diplomacy’ based on the recognition that a few tech companies have obviously become much ‘more influential than some nation states’. Klynge framed the new political course in the manner of a well-known old but still utterly contemporary mantra: ‘There is no alternative’. In a similar vein, Denmark’s Foreign Minister Anders Samuelson highlighted the importance of the step as follows: ‘Just as we engage in a diplomatic dialogue with countries, we also need to establish and prioritize comprehensive relations with tech actors, such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and so on. (…) The idea is, we see a lot of companies and new technologies that will in many ways involve and be part of everyday life of citizens in Denmark.'

Chat GPT in the Co-creation process for Applied Research Projects

ChatGPT’s emergence and subsequent evolution as a generative artificial intelligence tool introduces new ways of assisting students with research design. Fostering research skills with undergraduate students presents opportunities and challenges for faculty to aid with drafting research plans, questions for investigation, and methods for conducting the research. While some educators rightfully voice concerns over the ethical aspects of such a tool, this article will draw on my own experiences using ChatGPT 4.0 as a tool in research project supervision. I demonstrate how to prompt ChatGPT to give useful suggestions that can be used as actionable feedback. I also discuss how to instruct students to include ChatGPT in their research methodology when using the tool to refine research questions.