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Ethics as embodied by technology practitioners resists simple definition—particularly as it relates to the interplay of identity, organizational, and professional complexity. In this paper we use the linguistic notion of languaging as an analytic lens to describe how technology and design practitioners negotiate their conception of ethics as they reflect upon their everyday work. We engaged twelve practitioners in individual co-creation workshops, encouraging them to reflect on their ethical role in their everyday work through a series of generative and evaluative activities. We analyzed these data to identify how each practitioner reasoned about ethics through language and artifacts, finding that practitioners used a range of rhetorical tropes to describe their ethical commitments and beliefs in ways that were complex and sometimes contradictory. Across three cases, we describe how ethics was negotiated through language across three key zones of ecological emergence: the practitioner’s “core” beliefs about ethics, internal and external ecological elements that shaped or mediated these core beliefs, and the ultimate boundaries they reported refusing to cross. Building on these findings, we describe how the languaging of ethics reveals opportunities to definitionally and practically engage with ethics in technology ethics research, practice, and education.
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Wrangling Ethical Design Complexity: Dilemmas, Tensions, and Situations
Ethical engagement is central to the practice of design, impacting stakeholders across and beyond technology organizations as well as producing downstream social and environmental impacts. Scholars have previously described the ecologically-mediated nature of ethics in practice as a manifestation of “ethical design complexity;” however, the means of addressing this complexity is under-explored. In this provocation, we build on three years of prior empirical work on ethics and design practice to propose three ways of “wrangling” ethical design complexity: 1) articulating and interrogating complexity through constructed ethical dilemmas; 2) identifying potentially binding constraints through ethical tensions; and 3) describing and traversing naturalistically-defined ethical situations. We leverage these three approaches to provoke further scholarship and ethically-engaged design work.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1909714
- PAR ID:
- 10430370
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- DIS '23 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 179 to 183
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3563703.3596632
