Building an Ethics-Focused Action Plan: Roles, Process Moves, and Trajectories

Title of the Paper

Building an Ethics-Focused Action Plan: Roles, Process Moves, and Trajectories

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Research on ethical design and methodologies in the field of Human-Computer Interaction
• Keywords: Ethics, design methods, user experience, technological practice, ethical complexity, co-creation, method design, project trajectories

Research Background and Issues

• Identified Problems or Challenges:

  1. Designers and technology practitioners need tools to address ethical complexities in their daily work, but existing resources may not meet these needs.
  2. Many existing ethical tools and methods are not suitable for everyday practice, limiting their applicability.
  3. The process by which practitioners design, adapt, and improve support tools for themselves has not been sufficiently studied.

• Significance:

  1. Ethical issues directly impact the societal and user effects and values of the technologies and products being developed.
  2. Addressing rapidly changing laws, social norms, and public attention to design ethics requires innovative methods.
  3. Enhancing practitioners' ability to promote ethical change within teams and organizations is key to advancing socio-technological progress.

• Research Motivation and Related Work: This study builds on the concept of ethical design complexity ("felt ethical complexity"), which refers to how designers mediate complex ethical issues within their professional roles, organizations, and ethical frameworks. The research continues the current academic and practical focus on design ethics, exploring the creation of practitioner-led ethical support tools through co-creation methods.

Solution

• Proposed Methods or Solutions:

  1. Designed a co-creation-based research process, including six virtual workshops with 26 technology and design practitioners, guiding them to develop personalized ethical action plans.
  2. Provided methodological "building blocks," elements distilled from existing ethical methods, to support practitioners in designing action plans.
  3. Employed qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis to explore the roles and process moves adopted by practitioners during the action plan design process.

• Innovations:

  1. Shifted focus to practitioner-led tool development, emphasizing participatory creation processes for design tools compared to traditional user-centered design (designing tools for practitioners).
  2. Proposed three roles (Advocate, Operationalizer, Reformer) and three process moves (Refining, Expanding, Diverging) used by practitioners in designing ethical action plans.

• Implementation Steps and Key Techniques:

  1. Guided participants in discussing the ethical dilemmas they face and clarifying problem cards.
  2. Used a virtual "store" of 73 method modules to provide participants with tool options to support decision-making.
  3. Facilitated group discussions via Zoom and Miro platforms, allowing participants to iteratively refine their action plans.
  4. Final action plans were tested by participants for transferability and adaptability.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Findings:

  1. Identified three roles used by practitioners in ethical plan design:
     • The Advocate: Focuses on personal ethical awareness and seeks to promote it within the organization.
     • The Operationalizer: Concentrates on small-scale improvements in specific practices without analyzing broader ethical ecosystems.
     • The Reformer: Aims to drive profound ethical changes at the team or organizational level.
  2. Summarized three process moves used by practitioners:
     • Refining: Narrowing the scope of the problem to focus on specific details.
     • Expanding: Broadening the scope to add additional ecological complexity to address root issues.
     • Diverging: Adjusting the design direction toward new goals.

• Comparative Advantages:

  1. Offered a participatory new approach enabling practitioners to generate methods tailored to their organizational contexts, rather than merely adopting externally designed tools.
  2. Supported the recombination, deconstruction, and reconstruction of existing design knowledge (e.g., toolkits and methods).

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  1. The design trajectories of action plans revealed that practitioners' roles and process moves were influenced by their ecological perspectives, professional backgrounds, and ethical sensitivities.
  2. Participants successfully utilized existing modules to create design knowledge, demonstrating the potential of this modular approach to support practical applications.
  3. UX designers and product managers were more likely to generate actionable plans, while technical roles tended to focus on operational details.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  1. Participants found it challenging to envision how action plans could achieve long-term, cross-domain operability, requiring more upfront guidance and iterative support.
  2. The study did not directly test the implementation of action plans in real-world work settings; future research could explore longer-term, more sustained applications of action plans.
  3. A richer collection of "building blocks" is needed, particularly for practitioners from multidisciplinary backgrounds.

Future research recommendations include expanding ecological support for tool design, developing sustained ethical action plans for practitioners, and exploring the broader reusability of methodological modules.