Surveying the Landscape of Ethics-Focused Design Methods
This work addresses the need for systematic understanding of ethics-focused methods in HCI and design research, offering a foundational mapping for practitioners and researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing contributions.
The paper surveyed and analyzed 63 existing ethics-focused design methods to understand how they operationalize ethics and support designers, providing a descriptive content analysis and an initial definition to guide future development.
Over the past decade, HCI researchers, design researchers, and practitioners have increasingly addressed ethics-focused issues through a range of theoretical, methodological and pragmatic contributions to the field. While many forms of design knowledge have been proposed and described, we focus explicitly on knowledge that has been codified as "methods," which we define as any supports for everyday work practices of designers. In this paper, we identify, analyze, and map a collection of 63 existing ethics-focused methods intentionally designed for ethical impact. We present a content analysis, providing a descriptive record of how they operationalize ethics, their intended audience or context of use, their "core" or "script," and the means by which these methods are formulated, articulated, and languaged. Building on these results, we provide an initial definition of ethics-focused methods, identifying potential opportunities for the development of future methods to support design practice and research.