Intention-Setting Workshop: A Proposal for Incorporating Ethics into Design Practice Supported with Reflexivity and Debiasing Practices

In design practice, ethical considerations are often confined to the margins of the process, causing faulty and biased design outcomes, perpetuating outdated ideas, and contributing to inequalities that foster unjust power dynamics. Therefore, it is important to understand personal and team biases and their connection to ethics to ensure that designs go beyond normative solutions. While the importance of ethics is acknowledged in theory, it remains unclear for many practitioners how to act ethically in the design process. Yet, it is important that practitioners can consciously drive their design processes through an ethical lens, adopting a critical posthuman approach to develop sustainable solutions.

This paper details the findings of a service design master’s thesis project. Through a literature review, it identifies possible gaps between design ethics in theory and practice. Followingly, by analysing a pool of ethical tools, the paper assesses a variety of ways in which ethics are approached in design. Empirical findings are complemented by five semi-structured interviews conducted with experts with extensive ethical working records. Their insights support the synthesis of the collected qualitative data and the proposal of the ‘Intention-Setting Workshop.’ The workshop aims to provide an example of how to include ethics into the design process, utilising tools and reflexive and debiasing practices while being aware of the constraints of the working environment, often limiting the holistic incorporation of ethics. The workshop builds on the finding that active debiasing and reflexivity are essential for ethical and critical posthuman practice and that a holistic approach to the tools and methods used from the start of the design process benefits ethical work. Service design practitioners and students have validated the workshop proposal.

The project contributes to service design and design practice by envisioning a more holistic approach to implementing ethical tools to support more sustainable design solutions. In addition, it advocates for practitioners’ reflexive and debiasing work, which the paper argues contributes to ethical practice.