Designing Biotech Ethics Cards: Promoting Critical Making during an Online Workshop with Youth

Abstract

There are ethical concerns surrounding how youth interact with biowearable technology and the potential effects it has on their psychological and physiological health. We need to give youth the tools to critically reflect and explore ethical issues surrounding biowearables in order for them to make informed decisions about how they interact with them. To address this, we developed the Biotech Ethics cards as part of a critical making workshop. They are a set of design cards designed to scaffold critical reflection during a critical making workshop where youth prototype a biowearable from a kit. We focus this short paper on the requirements, initial design and revisions we made after studying card use in our workshop. We identified key design elements that are important in the cards and that may generalize to the design of other card sets meant to be integrated into a critical making process.