In this track we therefore welcomed papers that investigate or show how incorporating ethical reflection in the design process can foster creative solutions for future use of technology. Or the other way around: how design can cater for a creative approach to ethical deliberation. Completely in line with the theme of our track, the submitted papers show that there are multiple other creative ways to connect ethics and design.
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City governments increasingly experiment with civic participation in the procurement and the realization of smart city technologies in order to improve the incorporation of human values. In this paper, a model is proposed with the level of participation, the continuity of participation and the extent of institutional embedding to illustrate how challenging these experiments are. The City of Amsterdam also experiments with its procurement approach for a new camera car service that ensures an ethically responsible, privacy-friendly and secure collection of images from public space. Two starting points drive this change: 1) in order to have more control over the data, the municipality develops its own machine learning models for processing the images and 2) a multi-stakeholder co-design project including a citizen panel – is an integral part of the process in which the service is designed and realized. To support this new procurement process, a group of design-researchers were involved in a collaborative case study to identify requirements relevant for the tender. An analysis of the case study findings along the three dimensions brings us to the conclusion that the approach developed by the City of Amsterdam is a fruitful encounter between ‘doing ethics’ and procurement. The lessons of this procurement approach for ‘doing ethics’ are claimed to be of value for other practical contexts and further research.
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.
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