Scaffolding Ethics-Focused Methods for Practice Resonance

TL;DR

This paper introduces empirically-supported intentions to help practitioners select ethics-focused methods, and develops heuristics to evaluate the resonance of resources, aiming to improve ethical practice in design.

Contribution

It presents a novel set of intentions and heuristics to enhance the discoverability and relevance of ethics-focused methods for practitioners.

Findings

Practitioners prefer resources framed in accessible language.

Intentions effectively guide method selection in practice.

Heuristics improve resource resonance and usability.

Abstract

Numerous methods and tools have been proposed to motivate or support ethical awareness in design practice. However, many existing resources are not easily discoverable by practitioners. One reason being that they are framed using language that is not immediately accessible or resonant with the felt complexity of everyday practice. In this paper, we propose a set of empirically-supported "intentions" to frame practitioners' selection of relevant ethics-focused methods based on interviews with practitioners from a range of technology and design professions, and then leverage these intentions in the design and iterative evaluation of a website that allows practitioners to identify supports for ethics-focused action in their work context. Building on these findings, we propose a set of heuristics to evaluate the practice resonance of resources to support ethics-focused practice, laying the groundwork for increased ecological resonance of ethics-focused methods and method selection tools.