Wrangling Ethical Design Complexity: Dilemmas, Tensions, and Situations

Abstract

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.