Navigating Ethics and Power Dynamics through Participant-Designer Journey Mapping

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Participant-Designer Journey Map (PDJM), a tool designed to help design teams navigate ethical issues and power imbalances during ICT development, promoting more ethical and aware design practices.

Contribution

The paper presents the PDJM as a novel structured tool for addressing ethics and power dynamics in design processes, evaluated against existing tools by professionals.

Findings

PDJM identified as the most promising tool for ethical navigation.

Evaluation shows PDJM's potential to structure ethical decision-making.

Design professionals favor PDJM over alternatives.

Abstract

As Digital Transformation and innovation driven by Information and Communication Technology (ICT) continue to mark the evolution of society, ethics emerges as a central concern not only in terms of the outcomes and implications of technological systems but also throughout the activities carried out through the development of those systems. Power dynamics have been identified as a recurrent ethical challenge in the design and development process. As designers, participants, and project stakeholders engage in the process, potential conflicts, power imbalances, and ethical challenges emerge. This requires that awareness is raised on these imbalances and that teams proactively act on them. To address this issue, we propose the Participant-Designer Journey Map (PDJM), a tool to assist designers in conducting an ethical design process, aware of power imbalances. The proposal for the PDJM was evaluated, based on a set of criteria derived from the literature, by three design professionals, against nine other alternative tools. The PDJM was identified as the tool with the most potential to facilitate a structured approach to navigating ethical dilemmas, particularly those related to power dynamics.