Fateme Mohammadi Maklavani and Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders
As artificial intelligence (AI) and crowdsourcing become increasingly integrated into creative practices, designers face new ethical challenges in decision making. While AI offers efficiency through data-driven processes, and crowdsourcing introduces diverse human input, both raise concerns related to bias, accountability, authorship, and trust. Despite growing adoption, there remains limited empirical understanding of how future design practitioners perceive and evaluate these ethical implications.
This study explores ethical decision making in future design processes through a speculative co-design approach. First, participants articulate their present understanding of the concepts of design and designer. Subsequently, through a series of individual and group activities, participants engage with future-oriented scenarios (2040–2050), reflecting on how AI and crowdsourcing may shape creative workflows. In the final stage, they identify and discuss ethical challenges emerging from the use of these tools.
Findings reveal that design students and non-design students share concerns about the ethical implications of AI and crowdsourcing but differ in emphasis. Design students focus on system-level issues such as data reliability, governance, and process integrity, while non-design students highlight human-centred concerns, including fairness, agency, and social impact. These results suggest that ethical decision making in future design processes will depend on balancing computational capabilities with human values and collective input.
This research contributes insights regarding “design” and “designers” in both present and future contexts. It also offers an empirically grounded, practice-based understanding of how ethical concerns are anticipated in future design processes, offering insights for developing more grounded approaches to integrating AI and crowdsourcing into creative workflows.
Keywords: ethical decision making, artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing, speculative design, co-design, future design processes