Anti-Heroes: An Ethics-focused Method for Responsible Designer Intentions

TL;DR

This paper introduces Anti-Heroes, a card-based method that helps designers consider manipulative and value-centered roles to promote ethical decision-making during the design process.

Contribution

It presents a novel card deck tool that surfaces designer intentions and encourages ethical reflection through playful role-playing.

Findings

Playtesting with design students showed increased ethical awareness.

The card deck facilitated discussions on manipulative versus value-centered roles.

Implications for design education and practice were identified.

Abstract

HCI and design researchers have designed, adopted, and customized a range of ethics-focused methods to inscribe values and support ethical decision making in a design process. In this work-in-progress, we add to this body of resources, constructing a method that surfaces the designer's intentions in an action-focused way, encouraging consideration of both manipulative and value-centered roles. Anti-Heroes is a card deck that allows a designer to playfully take on pairs of manipulative (Anti-Hero) and value-centered (Hero) roles during design ideation/conceptualization, evaluation, and ethical dialogue. The card deck includes twelve cards with Anti-Hero and Hero faces, along with three action cards that include reflective questions for different play modes. Alongside the creation of the Anti-Hero card deck, we describe the evaluation and iteration of the card deck through playtesting sessions with four groups of three design students. We propose implications of Anti-Heros for technology and design education and practice.