My work explores whether a connection exists between the ethics of individuals and the creation of future ethical realities.
Speculative design ethics is an experimental platform I created for gathering perspectives on what ethics means for design practitioners through Speculative design.
What is Ethics?
Being human involves making choices. And whenever we make a choice, it means that we could have made a different one. Out of all the choices we can make at any given time, which choice should we make?
This is what ethics are. Ethics help us work out how to act.
What is Design Ethics?
Like ethics, design ethics are the choices we make daily, just at work. But unlike our personal ethics, design ethics impact our teams, clients, customers and society. But the way to design ethically doesn’t start with them or what they believe is ethical rather it starts with us as designers.
Before designers can identify, share and scale ethics at work, they need to firstly seek out where they stand ethically.
What is Speculative Design?
Speculative design is a theory which uses scenarios to travel ahead in time and paint a picture of what could happen if we don’t take new directions in the present. Speculative design began its life in the art world about a decade ago, created to theorise the practices artists were exploring to tell their story of alternate realities.
Pivoting this into design practice, Speculative design uses scenarios to project into the future in order to rethink the present.
Research and experiments
In early 2018, I initiated research to discover how designers can find their own ethics for my Masters in Design Futures thesis.
I began to notice questionable practices happening at work. I wondered if there was a framework (or process) for ethics that would help me (and others).
The research showed there wasn’t a simple framework to solve for design ethics. That only through reflecting on our practice could designers make more ethical decisions.
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DesignEthics.com.au is a platform that uses design experiments to gather data points on ethics, which forms the basis for my Speculative design ethics work.