[IxDA Discuss] Ethical Issues for Interaction Designers

[Olly Wright]

On 2 Aug 2007, at 03:42, Robert Reimann wrote:

> *Ethical* [*considerate, helpful*]
> - Do no harm
> - Improve human situations
>
> *Purposeful *[*useful, usable*]*
> *- Help users achieve their goals and aspirations
> - Accommodate user contexts and capacities
>
> *Pragmatic* [*viable, feasible*]
> - Help commissioning organizations achieve their goals
> - Accommodate business and technical requirements
>
> *Elegant* [*efficient, artful, affective*]
> - Represent the simplest, complete solution
> - Possess internal (self-revealing, understandable) coherence
> - Appropriately accommodate and stimulate cognition and emotion

For me, the problem with this kind of approach is you end up with a  
list that is on a certain level arbitrary and feels incomplete. Aka  
"ad hoc".

They are justifiable primarily in a circular way (eg, We should do  
Elegant design for the sake of being Elegant, and Pragmatic design  
for the sake of being Pragmatic). Then we take these as axioms and so  
pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps towards ethics. We have no  
way of knowing if we have a complete list, or of testing our  
assumptions beyound intuition. Or really in the end justifying our  
position beyond saying "don't you see, it's just obvious?".

Another way of seeing this is to ask the question: Should we be  
looking for...

1. A set of common sense guidelines that the majority intuitively  
feel are adequate / correct

2. A theory or theoretical framework that is testable / open to  
psychological / scientific / mathematical / observational / logical  
analysis. From this we can derive ethical imperatives through  
deduction and inference.

I suggest that we're looking for the second type. The examples given  
above are in my mind of the first type

Olly Wright