Ethics Pathways: A Design Activity for Reflecting on Ethics Engagement in HCI Research

TL;DR

Ethics Pathways is a design activity that helps HCI researchers reflect on their ethical engagement processes, emphasizing the complexity of situated institutional ethics practices through structured reflection tasks.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel design activity, Ethics Pathways, developed through playtesting, to facilitate understanding of researchers' ethics engagement in context.

Findings

Enhanced understanding of ethics engagement complexities

Effective reflection on ethical incidents and stakeholder roles

Insights into emotional and social dimensions of ethics in research

Abstract

This paper introduces Ethics Pathways, a design activity aimed at understanding HCI and design researchers' ethics engagements and flows during their research process. Despite a strong ethical commitment in these fields, challenges persist in grasping the complexity of researchers' engagement with ethics -- practices conducted to operationalize ethics -- in situated institutional contexts. Ethics Pathways, developed through six playtesting sessions, offers a design approach to understanding the complexities of researchers' past ethics engagements in their work. This activity involves four main tasks: recalling ethical incidents; describing stakeholders involved in the situation; recounting their actions or speculative alternatives; and reflection and emotion walk-through. The paper reflects on the role of design decisions and facilitation strategies in achieving these goals. The design activity contributes to the discourse on ethical HCI research by conceptualizing ethics engagement as a part of ongoing research processing, highlighting connections between individual affective experiences, social interactions across power differences, and institutional goals.