What Are “Ethics in Design”?; Slate, August 13, 2018

Victoria, Sgarro, Slate; What Are “Ethics in Design”?

"Examples of product design that fail on the ethics front are all too easy to find—like news feeds promoting fake news, ride-hailing companies psychologically exploiting workers, and virtual home assistants perpetuating negative gender stereotypes. It’s not that product designers don’t care about the ethical ramifications of their work—far from it. It’s that, too often, they assume that such considerations fall outside of their job description

Mike Monteiro, co-founder and design director of Mule Design and author of the influential essay “A Designer’s Code of Ethics,” says that this ignorance has become an issue with the rapid change in scope of design over the past decade. “Designers have been running fast and free with no ethical guidelines,” he told me. “And that was fine when we were designing posters and sites for movies. But now design is interpersonal relationships on social media, health care, financial data traveling everywhere, the difference between verified journalism and fake news. And this is dangerous.” 

Increasingly, though, the industry is taking ethics seriously. Every year at SXSW, John Maeda, the global head of computational design and inclusion at Automattic, presents the “Design in Tech Report,” which serves as a kind of State of the Union on design in technology. This year, Maeda focused on inclusion as the future of design. Maeda defines inclusive design as designing products for a broader audience—whether that’s people with disabilities, people living outside of the U.S., people of color, or older people. On his list of “the top 10 most critical issues and challenges currently facing design,” “ethics in design” came in third, behind “design not having a ‘seat at the table’ ” (No. 1), and “diversity in design and tech” (No. 2)."

The Internet of Things Needs a Code of Ethics; The Atlantic, May 1, 2017

Kaveh Waddell, The Atlantic; 

The Internet of Things Needs a Code of Ethics

"The Internet of Things, as it’s called, is also lacking a critical ethical framework, argues Francine Berman, a computer-science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a longtime expert on computer infrastructure. Together with Vint Cerf, an engineer considered one of the fathers of the internet, Berman wrote an article in the journal Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery about the need for an ethical system.

I spoke to her about ethical design, and how to balance individual privacy with the potential for social good of connected devices that share data with one another. A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for concision and clarity, follows."

Do no harm, don't discriminate: official guidance issued on robot ethics; Guardian, 9/18/16

Hannah Devlin, Guardian; Do no harm, don't discriminate: official guidance issued on robot ethics: "Isaac Asimov gave us the basic rules of good robot behaviour: don’t harm humans, obey orders and protect yourself. Now the British Standards Institute has issued a more official version aimed at helping designers create ethically sound robots.

The document, BS8611 Robots and robotic devices, is written in the dry language of a health and safety manual, but the undesirable scenarios it highlights could be taken directly from fiction. Robot deception, robot addiction and the possibility of self-learning systems exceeding their remits are all noted as hazards that manufacturers should consider.

Welcoming the guidelines at the Social Robotics and AI conference in Oxford, Alan Winfield, a professor of robotics at the University of the West of England, said they represented “the first step towards embedding ethical values into robotics and AI”.

“As far as I know this is the first published standard for the ethical design of robots,” Winfield said after the event. “It’s a bit more sophisticated than that Asimov’s laws – it basically sets out how to do an ethical risk assessment of a robot.”"