Employing "Everyday Ethics" in Design Practice

The work of technology practitioners is inherently ethical, requiring attention to a range of constraints, stakeholders, and forms of knowledge. In previous work, my colleagues and I have described some of these factors through the lens of ethical mediation, indicating the role of the designer in building ethical awareness and the ways this awareness may inspire action. In this talk, I focus on our collection, codification, and dissemination of a series of ethics-focused methods to inform a focus on everyday ethics in design practices. First, I describe some of the key components of ethical complexity and the challenges of supporting ethically-focused work. Second, I describe our process of collecting and characterizing ethics-focused design methods, including a comprehensive set of language to describe method components and stances. Finally, I share the outcomes of work we have conducted to scaffold the uptake of these methods by technology practitioners, laying the groundwork for a set of factors that may influence resonance of ethics-focused supports.