Towards ethical principles for participatory design practice

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to identify the kinds of ethical issues practitioners have to consider in participatory design (PD) practice and use these to inform a set of ethical principles, which can be used to guide practice. It begins by discussing the ways in which PD, as a discipline, has engaged with ethical issues in the past and looks at how other disciplines have identified ethical principles to support ethical practice. It, then, draws upon interviews with researchers who have the experience of collaborative and PD projects to identify ethical considerations that they have encountered in their work and uses these to propose a set of ethical principles. Finally, it ends with a discussion on how a principles-based approach can be combined with other approaches, such as the cultivation of virtues, to support ethical practice in PD.

KEYWORDS:

• Participatory design
• ethics
• design practice

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge Dr Alison Hay and Angela Tulloch for their input and support during the writing of this paper; also, in particular, I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the design researchers who shared their experiences with me for this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.