Ethics through design
Maria Alejandra Luján Escalante, Luke Moffat, Monika Büscher · Proceedings of DRS · 2022
Ethics through Design (EtD) uses co-design methods to create, facilitate and nurture anticipatory capabilities for research and innovation, responsive to both society and environment. In practice, EtD problematizes both Ethics and Design. This paper draws upon ethics of technology, specifically the work of Gilbert Simondon, to formulate principles of co-design facilitation. EtD understands ethics, beyond regulation and administrative ticking-box exercises, as contextual, creative and participatory ongoing processes. EtD has been developed within Disaster and Risk Management (DRM) and Emergency Response domains, over 7 years of working in partnership with emergency response practitioners, policymakers, academics across disciplines, standardization organizations and key IT developer companies. The main interdependent contributions of this article are 1) to articulate the EtD framework 2) to illustrate EtD methodology using a 5G infrastructure for public safety communications case study, and 3) to evaluate EtD persisting challenges for future applications in other domains.