Ethical Encounters in Design Practice: A Framework Grounded in Practitioner Experience

Paper Title

Ethical Encounters in Design Practice: A Framework Grounded in Practitioner Experience

Publication Info

• Topic area: Design ethics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and practice-oriented frameworks.
• Keywords: Design ethics, ethical encounters, HCI, practitioner experience, ethical frameworks, user advocacy, environmental sustainability, value alignment, ethical capacities.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing literature on design ethics often focuses on documenting experiences rather than developing conceptual or operational frameworks grounded in practice. Formalized approaches offer limited guidance on how values influence design decisions.
• Significance: Understanding and addressing ethical challenges in design practice is crucial for creating responsible, user-centered, and sustainable solutions, particularly as emerging technologies increasingly shape daily life.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research critiques static ethical frameworks and emphasizes the need for situated, practice-based approaches. While empirical studies have explored ethical tensions and decision-making, there remains a gap in providing actionable concepts and shared vocabularies for practitioners.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Ethical Encounters Framework, which models the dynamics of ethical issues, actions, and capacities as they unfold across design project phases.
• Novelty:
  1. Empirically derived categories describing ethical issues, actions, and capacities.
  2. Focus on the generative potential of ethical encounters in building capacities within design practice.
  3. Integration of ethical dimensions across distinct project phases, offering a temporal lens for analysis.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted semi-structured interviews with 27 design practitioners across Denmark, Italy, and Switzerland, yielding 98 accounts of ethical encounters.
  • Three rounds of coding: selective tagging of firsthand accounts, descriptive coding to unpack dynamics, and analytical coding to identify relationships between issues, actions, and capacities.
  • Developed a framework that situates ethical encounters within project phases and highlights their multidirectional and non-linear nature.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Ethical issues include user advocacy, environmental sustainability, personal values, legal compliance, ways of working, and value alignment.
  • Actions taken by practitioners include designing features, adapting tools and methods, employing dialogue tactics, organizing among colleagues, establishing formal structures, and occasionally taking no action.
  • Capacities generated include new roles (e.g., ethicist, advocate), tools and processes, design ideas, filtering mechanisms for ideas and demands, relational building, organizational processes, and ethos building.
• Advantage over baselines: The framework provides a structured, practice-oriented lens for understanding ethical encounters, emphasizing their capacity-building potential and temporal dynamics across project phases.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Data collected through interviews with mid- to senior-level practitioners from design consultancies.
  • Analysis focused on concrete, lived experiences rather than abstract definitions or hypothetical scenarios.
  • Findings validated through iterative coding and collaborative discussions among authors.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Geographic scope limited to three European countries; further research needed to include diverse global perspectives.
  • Retrospective nature of interviews may introduce biases; longitudinal studies could provide richer insights.
  • Focused on individual practitioner accounts; future research could explore team-level dynamics and structural mechanisms for ethical decision-making.

Summary

This paper introduces the Ethical Encounters Framework, grounded in practitioner experiences, to model how ethical issues, actions, and capacities unfold across design project phases. The framework highlights the generative potential of ethical encounters in shaping roles, processes, and organizational practices. Empirical findings from interviews with 27 design practitioners reveal recurring patterns in ethical challenges and responses, providing actionable insights for researchers and practitioners. By integrating ethical dimensions within a temporal structure, the framework offers a reflective tool for navigating ethical challenges and advancing practice-oriented design ethics research in HCI.