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What makes the design of futures sufficiently transformative? Worldwide, people are aware of the need to change and keep changing to address eco-social challenges and their fall-out in an age of crises and transitions in climate, biodiversity, and health. Calls for climate justice and the development of eco-social sensibilities speak to the need for dynamic and provisional engagements. Such concerns raise age-old issues of inequality and colonialist destruction. Our designs carry the imprint of this current politics, wittingly or unwittingly, into worlds to come. This conversation asked how might we respond fluidly to coming uncertainties, questioning our own practices to sow the seeds of more radical transformation, while recognizing the structural forces that can limit or temper opportunities for design activism. It was organized in three quadrant exercises, which we also reflect upon. 

As we rely upon increasingly complex sociotechnical systems to support ourselves and, by extension, the structures of society, it becomes yet more important to consider how ethics and values intertwine in design activity. Numerous methods that address issues related to ethics and value- centeredness in design activity exist, but it is unclear what role the design research and practice communities should play in shaping the future of these design approaches. Importantly, how might researchers and practitioners become more aware of the normative assumptions that underlie both their design activity and the design artifacts that result? Previous research has revealed that a designer’s awareness of ethical issues can be raised through value-centered design approaches and methods (c.f., value-sensitive design), but the broader ethical impacts of these approaches and methods are often underexplored. For example, the diversity of potential stakeholders and complexity of use contexts may not be immediately accessible to a designer, leaving their near- and long-term ethical responsibility under-developed. There is always the spectre of unintended consequences, while shifts in culture make designs not only obsolete but unfathomable. 

In this workshop, we seek to facilitate a shared understanding regarding the role of ethics and values in design practice and research, using this shared understanding to develop methods to investigate ethical decision-making. While existing study of ethics and values has largely focused on design methods for implementation in practice in an explicit and structured way (e.g., value-sensitive design, values at play), our focus is on the ways in which values might be discovered and generatively explored through qualitative and critical means, both by researchers and practitioners. Through collaborative activities and discussions, workshop participants will be engaged in analyzing existing design artifacts and processes, critiquing them through ethical lenses, and subsequently visualizing their process of value discovery. Outcomes from this workshop are expected to further deepen existing methods for uncovering ethics and values in a design process, highlighting potential opportunities for supporting practitioners’ work and ethical awareness.