Design Courts: Workshops for Exploring Emerging Technology Ethics
Namrata Primlani, Mark Blythe, Justin Marshall · 2025
Although it is now well recognized that HCI must take a greater account of ethics there is little consensus about which ethical systems are most appropriate or how to incorporate them into the design process. In this paper, we contribute a Design Court workshop method where opposing legal and ethical arguments are set against one another in the form of a mock trial. We describe how we structured and enacted these workshops by combining legal thought experiments and design fiction. The paper reports findings from three Design Courts where a fictional device is the subject of litigation. These court disputations focused on issues of privacy, reciprocity and intent in rich and nuanced debate. We argue that Design Courts may be a useful method for engaging competing ethical standpoints through contested dialogue.