Cultivating ethics with professional designers
Sharon Lindberg, Petter Karlström, Sirkku Männikkö Barbutiu · Nordic design research conference · 2023
Recent years have seen an increased interest in designers’ ethical responsibility. However, knowledge concerning how ethical practice could be cultivated in real-life settings is still lacking. In order to explore this issue, we formed a team with practitioners at a digital design studio. During 10 months, the team co-designed activities and materials intended to sensitize design practitioners at the studio to ethics. Our findings highlight the importance of presenting ethics in an appealing manner in order to engage designers, and this paper illustrates how we explored this in our project. Moreover, we discuss co-design as a collaborative space for engaging design practitioners in the exploration and development of ethics that go beyond “tick-box exercises”.