Our current smart society, where problems and frictions are smoothed out with smart, often invisible technology like AI and smart sensors, calls for designers who unravel and open the smart fabric. Societies are not malleable, and moreover, a smooth society without rough edges is neither desirable nor livable. In this paper we argue for designing friction to enhance a more nuanced debate of smart cities in which conflicting values are better expressed. Based on our experiences with the Moral Design Game, an adversarial design activity, we came to understand the value of creating tangible vessels to highlight conflict and dipartite feelings surrounding smart cities.
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The idea that technologies influence society—both positively and negatively—is not new. This is mainly the terrain of the philosophy and the ethics of technolo-gy research. Similarly, design research aims to help create new technologies in line with individual, social, and societal needs and values. Against this backdrop, it seems essential to expose relations between design and philosophy of tech-nology research, particularly from a methodological perspective. The main goal of this paper is to suggest a preliminary overview of methods and approaches that can inspire and inform interdisciplinary collaboration and, with that, sys-tematic engagement with ethics in design processes. Through interdisciplinary exchange, we propose a preliminary typology of ethics-informed methods and approaches based on two main dimensions, namely theory-grounded approaches to theoretically-flexible techniques and assessment to accompaniment. This mapping intends to help navigate the ethical qualities of selected methods from both disciplines, and it aims to create a platform for fruitful interdisciplinary conversations.
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