Anti-Heroes: A Role-Based Method to Encourage Ethical Deliberation

HCI and design researchers have designed, adopted, and customized a range of ethics-focused methods to inscribe values and support ethical decision-making in a design process. In this paper, we add to this body of resources, constructing a method that surfaces the designer's intentions in an action-focused way, encouraging consideration of both manipulative and value-centered designer roles. Anti-Hero is a card deck that allows a designer to playfully take on pairs of manipulative (Anti-Heroes) and value-centered (Heroes) roles during design ideation/conceptualization, evaluation, and ethical dialogue. We illustrate the complexity of our ethics-focused method creation through a Research through Design (RtD) approach, reflecting on our iterative design decisions and outcomes from a playtesting evaluation with student designers. We reflect upon method affordances and performance ambiguities based on playtesting outcomes, indicating important areas of focus in future ethics-focused method creation and evaluation.