Rafail Andrianos Pappas
The global, grand challenges of our time signify that design can have a substantial impact on many aspects of life. Design ethics, both as theory and as methodology, offers some guidance on how to ensure that design has desirable outcomes and gives tools to discover which outcomes are desirable. At the same time, systems thinking and systems theory also offer an approach that can help designers grasp the grand scale of things and deal with the complexity of the world. Even though there is rich work on the interrelationship between systems and design and between ethics and design, there is a lack of work towards a direction where design ethics is informed by systems thinking and systemic theory.
This work introduces four design ethics approaches with their main theoretical points and criticisms summarised: morality of things, value sensitive design, responsible research and innovation, and participatory design. For all four, I argue that no immediate or specific connections are made between these ethical design approaches and systems thinking, even though there seems to be space for making such connections. In some cases, such connections already exist implicitly. In all four approaches, concepts of systems thinking could inform the design ethics approaches, offering both an alternative theoretical perspective through systems theory and enriching the practical methodologies by employing systems thinking tools.
This opens the way for a new direction for thinking about design ethics, one where we move towards systems oriented design thinking frameworks and mindsets. This new approach can reinforce existing methodologies, giving them both a theoretical grounding and an extra systemic tool-set, and clears the way towards systemic design ethics.
KEYWORDS: Design ethics, systemic design ethics, systems thinking, morality of things, value-sensitive design, responsible research and innovation, participatory design
RSD TOPIC(S): Methods & Methodology