This document discusses design ethics and how designers must consider ethics when creating products and systems. It explains that designed things can influence human will, agency, and morality, so designers are accountable and must make ethical choices. The document outlines different approaches to analyzing ethical choices, such as consequentialist and deontological analyses. It provides examples of how design decisions can have measurable effects on society and conditions. The document advocates for open design, flexibility, and allowing ethical choices.

1. Design Ethics
@fredvanamstel, PhD researcher at University of Twente

2. What is ethics anyway?
• Universal values
• The notion of goodness
• Societal norms

3. Ethical choice
What should
Morality I do?
Action
What do I
want to do? What can I
do?
Will Agency

4. Why ethics is important for design
• Designed things influence will, agency and morality
• Designers must make ethical choices
• Designers are accountable
• There are norms other than regulations to be
followed

6. How to analyze ethical choices
• Consequentialist
• Measurable effects
• Conditions for acting
• Deontologic
• Explicit intentions
• Explications

7. Measurable example
• Robert Moses was one of the
major player on prioritizing cars
in United States urban planning
• He built bridges too low for
buses
• Paved big highways with thin
sidewalks

8. Intentional example
• Brasilia city was completely
built from scratch to symbolize
the modernization of Brazil
• Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer
designed buildings that clearly
introduced new political values

9. Architecture of Hapiness
Allain de Botton

10. Diversity
• The Pruit-Igoe complex was a
huge failure because people
didn’t wanted to be leveled
down
• Modernity coexist with pre-
modernity and post-modernity

11. Metadesign
• Design the conditions for design
• Tools, process, principles
• Extrapolate possibilities
• Make actionable functions

12. Is technology neutral?

13. Open Design
• Design simple tools
• Share design knowledge
• Flexibility for adaptations
• Expand possibilities, allow ethical choices

14. http://openarchitecturenetwork.org

15. http://www.ewb-international.org/

16. Exercises
Behavior changing briefings

17. Design With Intent Toolkit
• Cards to provoke designers to
think about possible ways to
influence behavior
• http://www.danlockton.com/
dwi/Main_Page

18. Energy waste
• People waste unecessary energy for internal climate control
which
card seems
more similar to
this solution?

19. Traffic in Enschede Center
• There are too much cars going
inside the city center
• How to desincourage going to
the center by car?

20. Foreigners
• Hypothetic scenario: Europe is
crashed and only Nederlands
preserved its economy
• Many legal and illegal imigrants
enter the country
• Imigrants creates a lot of
annoyment
• How to induce imigrants to leave
the country without using brute
force?

21. Thank you!
@fredvanamstel