Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Full

Exploring the Ethics in Design Practices

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5338078
AutoresMarc Steen (0000-0001-7915-5459, TNO, Delft, The Netherlands, autor de correspondencia)
Año2015
Volumen40
Número3
Páginas389-420
Fecha de publicación2015-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaScience Technology & Human Values (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0162-2439 • E-ISSN: 1552-8251
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0162243914547645
OpenAlexW2028329397
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas16
Referencias citadas79

Contemporary design practices, such as participatory design (PD), human-centered design (HCD), and codesign, have inherent ethical qualities, which often remain implicit and unexamined. Three design projects in the high-tech industry were studied using three ethical traditions as lenses. Virtue ethics helped to understand cooperation, curiosity, creativity, and empowerment as virtues that people in PD need to cultivate, so that they can engage, for example, in mutual learning and collaborative prototyping. Ethics of alterity (Levinas and Derrida) helped to understand human-centered design as a fragile encounter between project team members and prospective users, and foregrounds the ethics in these encounters: our tendencies to "grasp the other" and to "program invention." And pragmatist ethics (Dewey) helped to understand codesign as a process of joint inquiry and imagination, involving the organization of iterative processes of problem setting and solution finding, with moral qualities. When we open the "black boxes" of design practices, we find them filled with ethics. Moreover, it is proposed that design practitioners need to make explicit their practices' inherent ethical qualities and that they can do that by embracing reflexivity

Creativity · Design Thinking · Engineering ethics · Epistemology · Pragmatism · Reflexivity · Social science · Sociology · Computer Science · Design Education and Practice · Engineering · Information Systems Theories and Implementation · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology