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1. Identity Claims that Underlie Ethical Awareness and Action

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445375  

   Chivukula, Shruthi Sai; Hasib, Aiza; Li, Ziqing; Chen, Jingle; Gray, Colin M. (May 2021, Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   HCI and STS researchers have previously described the ethical complexity of practice, drawing together aspects of organizational complexity, design knowledge, and ethical frameworks. Building on this work, we investigate the identity claims and beliefs that impact practitioners’ ability to recognize and act upon ethical concerns in a range of technology-focused disciplines. In this paper, we report results from an interview study with 12 practitioners, identifying and describing their identity claims related to ethical awareness and action. We conducted a critically-focused thematic analysis to identify eight distinct claims representing roles relating to learning, educating, following policies, feeling a sense of responsibility, being a member of a profession, a translator, an activist, and deliberative. Based on our findings, we demonstrate how the claims foreground building competence in relation to ethical practice. We highlight the dynamic interplay among these claims and point towards implications for identity work in socio-technical contexts. 

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2. Understanding “Dark” Design Roles in Computing Education

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3446871.3469754  

   Gray, Colin M.; Chivukula, Shruthi Sai; Melkey, Kassandra; Manocha, Rhea (August 2021, ICER 2021: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research)

   null (Ed.)

   In conjunction with the increasing ubiquity of technology, computing educators have identified the need for pedagogical engagement with ethical awareness and moral reasoning. Typical approaches to incorporating ethics in computing curricula have focused primarily on abstract methods, principles, or paradigms of ethical reasoning, with relatively little focus on examining and developing students’ pragmatic awareness of ethics as grounded in their everyday work practices. In this paper, we identify and describe computing students’ negotiation of values as they engage in authentic design problems through a lab protocol study. We collected data from four groups of three students each, with each group including participants from either undergraduate User Experience Design students, Industrial Engineering students, or a mix of both. We used a thematic analysis approach to identify the roles that students took on to address the design prompt. Through our analysis, we found that the students took on a variety of “dark” roles that resulted in manipulation of the user and prioritization of stakeholder needs over user needs, with a focus either on building solutions or building rationale for design decisions. We found these roles to actively propagate through design discourses, impacting other designers in ways that frequently reinforced unethical decision making. Even when students were aware of ethical concerns based on their educational training, this awareness did not consistently result in ethically-sound decisions. These findings indicate the need for additional ethical supports to inform everyday computing practice, including means of actively identifying and balancing negative societal impacts of design decisions. The roles we have identified may productively support the development of pragmatically-focused ethical training in computing education, while adding more precision to future analysis of computing student discourses and outputs. 

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3. Value‐sensitive design of chatbots in environmental education: Supporting identity, connectedness, well‐being and sustainability

   https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13568  

   Nguyen, Ha; Nguyen, Victoria; Ludovise, Sara; Santagata, Rossella (January 2025, British Journal of Educational Technology)

   While offering the potential to support learning interactions, emerging AI applications like Large Language Models (LLMs) come with ethical concerns. Grounding technology design in human values can address AI ethics and ensure adoption. To this end, we apply Value‐Sensitive Design—involving empirical, conceptual and technical investigations—to centre human values in the development and evaluation of LLM‐based chatbots within a high school environmental science curriculum. Representing multiple perspectives and expertise, the chatbots help students refine their causal models of climate change's impact on local marine ecosystems, communities and individuals. We first perform an empirical investigation leveraging participatory design to explore the values that motivate students and educators to engage with the chatbots. Then, we conceptualize the values that emerge from the empirical investigation by grounding them in research in ethical AI design, human values, human‐AI interactions and environmental education. Findings illuminate considerations for the chatbots to support students' identity development, well‐being, human–chatbot relationships and environmental sustainability. We further map the values onto design principles and illustrate how these principles can guide the development and evaluation of the chatbots. Our research demonstrates how to conduct contextual, value‐sensitive inquiries of emergent AI technologies in educational settings. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topicGenerative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies like Large Language Models (LLMs) can not only support learning, but also raise ethical concerns such as transparency, trust and accountability.Value‐sensitive design (VSD) presents a systematic approach to centring human values in technology design.What this paper addsWe apply VSD to design LLM‐based chatbots in environmental education and identify values central to supporting students' learning.We map the values emerging from the VSD investigations to several stages of GenAI technology development: conceptualization, development and evaluation.Implications for practice and/or policyIdentity development, well‐being, human–AI relationships and environmental sustainability are key values for designing LLM‐based chatbots in environmental education.Using educational stakeholders' values to generate design principles and evaluation metrics for learning technologies can promote technology adoption and engagement. 

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4. Co-designing Ethical Supports for Technology Practitioners

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ETHICS57328.2023.10155098  

   Li, Ziqing; Obi, Ike; Chivukula, Shruthi Sai; Will, Matthew; Johns, Janna; Pivonka, Anne C.; Carlock, Thomas; Menon, Ambika R.; Bharadwaj, Aayushi; Gray, Colin M. (May 2023, 2023 IEEE International Symposium on Ethics in Engineering, Science, and Technology (ETHICS))

   In an era of ubiquitous digital interfaces and systems, technology and design practitioners must address a range of ethical dilemmas surrounding the use of persuasive design techniques and how to balance shareholder and end-user needs [2], [5]. Similarly, the increasing user concerns about unethical products and services [1] is paralleling a rise in regulatory interests in enforcing ethical design and engineering practices among technology practitioners, surfacing a need for further support. Although various scholars have developed frameworks and methods to support practitioners in navigating these challenging contexts [3], [4], often, there is a lack of resonance between these generic methods and the situated ethical complexities facing the practitioner in their everyday work. In this project, we designed and implemented a three-hour cocreation workshop with designers, engineers, and technologists to support them to develop bespoke ethics-focused action plans that are resonant with the ethical challenges they face in their everyday practice. In developing the co-creation session, we sought to answer the following questions to empower practitioners: • How can we support practitioners in developing action plans to address ethical dilemmas in their everyday work? and • How can we empower designers to design more responsibly? Building on these questions as a guide, we employed Miro, a digital whiteboard platform, to develop the co-creation experience. The final c o-creation e xperience w as d esigned w ith the visual metaphor of a “house” with four floors and multiple rooms that allowed participants to complete different tasks per room, all aimed towards the overall goal of developing participants' own personalized action plan in an interactive and collaborative way. We invited participants to share their stories and ethical dilemmas to support their creation and iteration of a personal action plan that they could later use in their everyday work context. Across the six co-creation sessions we conducted, participants (n=26) gained a better understanding of the drivers for ethical action in the context of their everyday work and developed an action plan through the co-creation workshop that enabled them to constructively engage with ethical challenges in their professional context. At the end of the session, participants were provided the action plans they created to allow them to use it in their practice. Furthermore, the co-design workshops were designed such that practitioners could take them away (the house and session guide) and run them independently at their organization or another context to support their objectives. We describe the building and the activities conducted in each floor below and will provide a pictorial representation of the house with the different floors, rooms, and activities on the poster presentation. a) First floor-Welcome, Introduction, Reflection: The first floor of the virtual house was designed to allow participants to introduce themselves and to reflect on and discuss the ethical concerns they wished to resolve during the session. b) Second floor-Shopping for ethics-focused methods: The second floor of the virtual house was designed as a “shopping” space where participants selected from range of ethicsfocused building blocks that they wish to potentially adapt or incorporate into their own action plan. They were also allowed to introduce their own methods or tools. c) Third floor-DIY Workspace: The third floor was designed as a DIY workspace to allow the participants to work in small groups to develop their own bespoke action plan based on building blocks they have gathered from their shopping trip and by using any other components they wish. The goal here was to support participants in developing methods and action plans that were resonant with their situated ethical complexities. d) Fourth floor-Gallery Space: The fourth floor was designed as a gallery to allow participants to share and discuss their action plans with other participants and to identify how their action plans could impact their future practice or educational experiences. Participants were also provided an opportunity at this stage to reflect on their experience participating in the session and provide feedback on opportunities for future improvement. 

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5. Using science fiction texts to surface user reflections on privacy

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3123024.3123080  

   Wong, Richmond Y.; Mulligan, Deirdre K.; Chuang, John (October 2017, Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers)

   We explore how an excerpt from a science fiction novel describing a near-future miniature wireless streaming camera technology can be used to elicit privacy concerns from participants. We conduct an online experiment (n=151) to compare participants' responses to a narrative fiction passage and a "plain" functional description of the same imagined technology. Qualitatively we find that participants with the fiction passage raised concerns about different types of privacy harms and were more likely to suggest design modifications to protect privacy. Quantitatively, we find that participants with the fiction passage provided higher ratings of negative affect, and lower ratings of comfort and acceptability. This suggests that researchers trying to understand users' privacy concerns with new ubiquitous computing technologies may benefit from presenting the technology in multiple formats to elicit a broader range of values reflections. 

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