[IxDA Discuss] Ethical Issues for Interaction Designers

[Sebi Tauciuc]

On 8/2/07, Olly Wright <olly.wright at mediacatalyst.com> wrote:

>
> 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
>
>
>
Even if we are looking for no.2, we still need no.1 to support it. Even if
we 'derive ethical imperatives through deduction and inference', they will
still need to intuitively feel adequate in order to be widely adopted. And
they will need to have different levels of detail and complexity when they
are formulated: I may not be able to understand the most complex definitions
of what ethical design means to some, but I still need something to relate
to when I decide which projects I am willing to work on.

By the way, it does sound like a good idea to have our own declared 'code of
conduct', or at least widely-accepted definition of 'ethical design'. I hope
we take it beyond this discussion.


-- 
Sergiu Sebastian Tauciuc
http://www.sergiutauciuc.ro/en/