Scaffolding Ethics-Focused Methods for Practice Resonance

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Scaolding Ethics-Focused Methods for Practice Resonance

COLIN M. GRAY, Purdue University, USA

SHRUTHI SAI CHIVUKULA, Indiana University, USA

THOMAS CARLOCK and ZIQING LI, Purdue University, USA

JA-NAE DUANE, Bentley University, Departments of Information and Process Management, USA

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 ndings, 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.

CCS Concepts:

•Human-centered computing →Empirical studies in HCI

;

HCI design and evaluation methods

;

Usability

testing.

Additional Key Words and Phrases: design methods, design and technology practice, ethics-focused methods, ethics, scaolding

ACM Reference Format:

Colin M. Gray, Shruthi Sai Chivukula, Thomas Carlock, Ziqing Li, and Ja-Nae Duane. 2023. Scaolding Ethics-Focused Methods for

Practice Resonance. 1, 1 (October 2023), 22 pages. https://doi.org/XXXXXXX.XXXXXXX

Draft: September 13, 2022

1 INTRODUCTION

Supporting ethically-focused design practices has long been a goal in the HCI community, with various attention

over the past three decades towards the development of a meaningful code of ethics [

], the identication of

accreditation or programmatic requirements in technology education that address ethical responsibility [

and an increasing body of methods, toolkits, and other resources that are intended to encourage ethically-focused or

ethically-sensitive design practices [13, 30, 76].

Ethical dimensions of practice are known to be complex, contingent, and situated in relation to a wide range of factors,

which include the ethical knowledge and judgments of individual practitioners [

]; the existence of standards,

resources, and processes that support ethics-focused inquiry [

]; and the mediation of organizational and

Authors’ addresses: Colin M. Gray, gray42@purdue.edu, Purdue University, 401 N Grant Street, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, 47907; Shruthi Sai Chivukula,

schivuku@iu.edu, Indiana University, 901 E 10th St Informatics West, Bloomington, Indiana, USA; Thomas Carlock, tcarloc@purdue.edu; Ziqing Li,

li3242@purdue.edu, Purdue University, 401 N Grant Street, West Lafayette, Indiana, 47907, USA; Ja-Nae Duane, jduane@bentley.edu, Bentley University,

Departments of Information and Process Management, 175 Forest St., Waltham, Massachusetts, USA.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not

made or distributed for prot or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the rst page. Copyrights for third-party

components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).

Manuscript submitted to ACM

Manuscript submitted to ACM 1

arXiv:2210.02994v1 [cs.HC] 6 Oct 2022

2 Gray, et al.

practitioner forces to encourage action [

]. Historic work on supporting ethical awareness has

included the development of a range of methods to support ethically-focused action, including activities to design for

privacy [

], acknowledge data security [

], highlight and correct gender representations in software [

], and

implement value-sensitive practices [

], among numerous others. A recent collection of such methods by Chivukula

et al. [

] has described a set of 63 such methods with an explicit ethical focus, including 15 methods drawing from

the academically-popular Value Sensitive Design approach as well as 14 additional methods that are part of the Design

Ethically or Ethics for Designers toolkits created by practitioners, which have not previously been addressed in HCI

literature. While resources clearly exist to support ethically-focused work, relatively little attention has been paid to

how these methods are discovered, compared, and used by designers—what we describe as the scaolding that encourages

and supports practitioner engagement in method selection and use. Additionally, while scholars have described the

need for design knowledge and tools to be resonant with the ecological complexity of design practice, few methods have

been validated for these resonance qualities in relation to specic use contexts or practitioner goals [

]. In

addressing the scaolding of ethics-focused methods in practice-resonant ways, we build upon the historic interest of

HCI as a discipline in creating tools that scaold user behaviors, from early examples such as Carroll’s “training wheels”

approach to software learning in the 1980s [

] to modern “onboarding” practices on websites and apps that increase

learnability and support “quick wins” on the part of users [

]. Using scaolding as a point of focus we ask: How can

design and technology practitioners leverage resources to build a stronger sense of ethical awareness and ability to

act? Scaolding these behaviors to result in meaningful connections between existing resources and ethically-focused

practices is the core issue we seek to address in this paper.

In this paper, we use an action research (AR) approach [

] to identify new means of supporting technology and

design practitioners’ engagement in ethical design complexity, including means of better supporting ethical awareness

and action in their everyday design practices. Our approach includes three parts: 1) identication of intentions that

drive ethical action; 2) the creation of an ethics-focused method discovery tool; and 3) the iterative evaluation of this

tool that resulted in a preliminary set of practice-resonance heuristics. First, we conducted a new analysis of interviews

previously conducted with 25 technology and design practitioners, which we used to create a set of seven “intentions”

that practitioners can use to frame their pursuit of new methods to support ethically-engaged work. Second, building on

these intentions, we designed an interactive method discovery website that contained an existing set of 63 ethics-focused

methods proposed by Chivukula et al. [

], which we then tagged with intentions and other metadata to support

practitioner identication and use of ethics-focused methods. Third, we iteratively evaluated the method website with

10 design practitioners and students, supporting improvements to the website itself and also aiding us in identifying an

initial set of six heuristics that support the creation of practice-resonant scaolds for ethically-focused design work. In

this multi-phase action research project, our guiding research questions were as follows:

(1)

What intentions can be used to frame a designers desire to support their ethics-focused practice in ecologically

meaningful terms?

(2) How can we scaold the selection of methods in ways that support designers’ ethical awareness and action?

(3) What qualities of method discovery appear to increase practice resonance?

Our contribution in this paper is three-fold: First, we describe a set of empirically-supported “intentions” that frame

practitioners’ motivations for selecting a method or tool to support ethically-focused action, laying the groundwork for

the targeted creation of new methods and more eective scaolding of existing practices. Second, we propose a means

of employing intentions to structure practitioners’ selection of methods that are relevant to support ethically-focused

Manuscript submitted to ACM

Scaolding Ethics-Focused Methods for Practice Resonance 3

practice, providing an example of how instrumental judgments and methods might be connected to support emergent

practitioner needs. Third, we identify an initial set of heuristics to evaluate resources for practice resonance, laying

the groundwork for the creation and iteration of methods and other tools in ways that accounts for the ecological

complexity of real-world practice.

2 BACKGROUND WORK

2.1 Methods and Their Use by Practitioners

Designers rely on a range of sources of knowledge to support their everyday work [

], including theory,

practical design exemplars, and many other types of intermediate-level knowledge in a space that Löwgren describes

as “non-empty” [

]. In this paper, we specically focus on one form of this intermediate-level knowledge, the design

method, which contains the potential for design action (Gray [

] refers to this element as the method “script”) but

does not fully dene how, or in what form, that potential might take when the method is performed [

When engaging the complexity of real world practice, designers must select appropriate forms of knowledge that

will support and move their design work forward, relying upon their capacity for design judgment [

]—and in

relation to the use of methods particularly, their use of instrumental judgments inform which method is selected, with

what intention, and how the designer knows when the method has been ecacious (or not) [

]. In previous

studies, practitioners report that methods use is, in a sense, is more about “mindset” than the method itself [

], while

also underscoring that methods can be important “mental tools” that can structure the complexity of practitioners’

everyday work [

]. In the current state of the literature, a somewhat uneasy relationship is present between codication

and performance, with some scholars such as Goodman focusing on the improvisatory qualities of methods use in

practice [

] while other scholars such as Daalhuizen and Cash [

] focus on how elements of methods may predict

future patterns of performance. For the purposes of this paper, we recognize that method codication and performance

are connected, but are often considered separately [

]. Many scholarly eorts in relation to design methods have

focused on the validation of individual methods, often in relation to specic lab-managed protocols or other means

of controlling for design complexity, including both experimental and implementation-focused studies. Eisenmann

et al. [

] report on a recent survey of such design validation literature, describing issues of alignment that relate

to a lack of shared vocabulary across methods (including relevant metrics to compare performance), describing this

challenge as follows: “most design method developers set goals for their own methods and therefore develop a separate

operationalisation resulting in a multitude of metrics. This makes it very challenging to compare methods with each

other and hinders researchers to build a common standard for similar methods.” [

, p. 633]. As a more ecologically-

focused metric of methods use, Gericke [

] describes the potential for individual methods to exist as part of a methods

ecosystem, “provid[ing] numerous [.. . ] methods for dierent purposes and ways to combine and supplement them.”

In parallel with scholarly inquiry into method validation, over the past decade, a range of collections of methods

have been published to support design students, practitioners, and non-design professionals alike. Popular print-based

methods collections such as Universal Methods of Design [

] and the Delft Design Guide [

] have become common

tools in design education settings, while other digital collections such as a collection of methods as part of IDEO’s

Design Kit

are intended to support design thinking-focused work in a range of educational and practitioner settings.

In this paper, our focus is practice-led and action oriented [

], seeking to result in “cycle-around” research that

connects practitioner-led bubbling up of experiences relating to ethical support with the creation of a tool that can

1https://www.designkit.org/methods

Manuscript submitted to ACM

4 Gray, et al.

then enter the practical lexicon of everyday technology and design work. Thus, we engage with historic framings

of methods in a scholarly sense while also acknowledging the growing popularity of collections of methods which

allow practitioners to navigate among and select methods that add potential value to their practice. To make methods

tractable for our analysis and design work, we rely upon the analysis of a collection of ethics-focused methods described

in a recent survey by Chivukula et al. [

] as well as denitional work around components of methods by Gray [

]

and other related design theory scholarship [

]. For instance, to inform our mapping of methods in relation to

intentions in Section 4, we leverage Gray’s concept of the method core, which describes the “central conceit or framing

metaphor that makes the entire method, or a portion of the method, coherent and potentially interchangeable” [

, p. 8].

2.2 Supports for Ethically-Focused Practice

Scholars have increasingly paid attention to the role that ethics plays in describing normative dimensions of design prac-

tices [

], including conversations relating the designer’s goal in producing socially and ethically responsible design

outcomes [

], the identication of relevant ethical standards to support appropriate design behaviors [

and the mapping of stakeholders that hold responsibility for the ethical soundness of design outcomes [

Over the past two decades, methods and approaches that have an ethical focus have been developed in academic

literature and by design practitioners and design organizations [

]. For example, value-sensitive methods

developed and evaluated as part of the Value Sensitive Design approach have been proposed and disseminated, often

using academic publications as a primary vehicle for evaluation and publication

. In parallel, organizations and design

practitioners alike have begun to create methods to support ethical reasoning in practice, including both expansive

toolkits (e.g., Microsoft’s Inclusive Design methodology) and sets of methods (e.g., practitioner Kat Zhou’s Design

Ethically toolkit or Jet Gispen’s Ethics for Designers toolkit) [

]. In total, Chivukula et al. [

] have identied 63

such methods, including a mix of practitioner- and academically-produced tools with a wide range of foci, means of

presentation, and potential opportunities for incorporation into design processes. Due to the diversity of these method

authors and purposes, the current adoption and awareness of these support tools is mixed, with practitioner tools

often not generating awareness by design scholars or educators and scholarly tools often not generating awareness by

practitioners—a classic example of the research-practice gap that has been proposed by other HCI scholars [7, 15, 51].

With the recognition of this gap between academia and practice, we seek to prioritize a growing interest and body

of work—largely driven by practitioners—that privileges practice-driven approaches to formulate guidance that is

presented in ways that are resonant with the needs and requirements of practitioners (e.g., [24, 25, 64]).

In addressing this complex and rapidly evolving space, in this paper we rely upon previous descriptions of factors

that impact the adoption of ethics-focused approaches in practice. We ground our understanding of these practice

contexts through Gray and Chivukula’s description of felt ethical design complexity, dened as: “the complex and

choreographed arrangements of ethical considerations that are continuously mediated by the designer through the lens

of their organization, individual practices, and ethical frameworks” [

], which builds on a number of critical accounts

of ethics in technology practice by Shilton, Wong, Steen, and others [

]. We also identied the importance

of considering both the normative thrust of ethical guidance and the agency of the designer, building upon the work of

Donia and Shaw [

] to take seriously the role of the practitioner. In depicting the role of practitioners in these complex

settings, we take on a practice-led framing, seeking not to mandate specic forms of engagement with methods or

resources that have been designed or otherwise asserted by scholars, but rather to better understand what kinds of

2See a list of these methods and related publications at https://vsdesign.org/vsd/ and [30]

Manuscript submitted to ACM

Scaolding Ethics-Focused Methods for Practice Resonance 5

supports or scaolds are needed for practitioners to make reasoned judgments about their methods selection and use

that may then inform their work practices.

3 OUR APPROACH

In this paper, we use an action research (AR) approach [

] to engage with the interest of a range of technology

and design practitioners in becoming more ethically aware and active in their workplaces, using both practical and

emancipatory qualities of AR to enable and empower practitioners to shape their local work contexts with new ethical

supports. We began our multi-phase project by leveraging interviews we conducted with 25 practitioners which

elucidated their experiences addressing ethical dilemmas in their everyday work and ecological challenges they faced

in confronting these challenges. Analysis of these interviews allowed us to frame a set of potential intentions for

ethical support, grounded in practice contexts and vocabulary (detailed in Sections 3.1). Based on these intentions and

prior work that has described a landscape of ethics-focused methods which, if adopted by practitioners, could increase

the potential for ethical awareness and action [

], we designed a resource discovery site as a scaold to support

the ethically-focused practice of technology and design practitioners, students, and educators. Finally, we conducted

an evaluation of this website to identify opportunities for improvement, characterizing both usability concerns and

emergent heuristics for practice-resonance for this website and future ethics-focused resources.

3.1 Stage 1: Creating Method “Intentions”

We used a reexive thematic analysis approach [

] to characterize a set of framings, intentions, or lters that would illus-

trate various dimensions of support that practitioners may utilize to support their ethics-focused practice, importantly

using vocabulary that was accessible and resonant with their everyday work. We iteratively and reexively framed

“intentions” through four rounds of analysis, resulting in a nal set of seven intentions that we report in Section 4. In this

stage, we drew on two sources of data. First, we analyzed a set of previously conducted interviews with 25 practitioners

that provided a robust description of ethical dilemmas and related complexity. These interviews were conducted with

technology and design practitioners from a range of professional roles (e.g., UX designer, software engineer, data

scientist, product manager) and were 60–90 minutes in duration. Each semi-structured interview included detailed

discussions of ethical dilemmas the practitioner had faced, their awareness of the ethical dimensions of their practice,

and strategies they had used to support ethically-informed action. Building on this overall structure, we sought to

identify what needs the practitioners had in supporting their ethical awareness and responsibility in their everyday work,

ecological factors that impact dierent forms of ethical mediation and complexity, and the disciplinary values engaged

by dierent practitioner roles in an organization. This helped us frame the intentions to align practice-resonance and

knowledge as learnt from the practitioners. Second, we built upon descriptions of a collection of ethics-focused methods

and related vocabulary previously described by Chivukula et al. [

]. This collection included an evaluation of 63

ethics-focused methods and an initial set of descriptors that described the ethical focus or “core” of each method. This

collection enabled us to map the desire for ethical supports in our interviews with pragmatic supports that had already

been proposed in published methods.

•

Mapping Possibilities to Filter Methods: In the rst stage, we attempted to identify all of the possibilities of

ltering the set of supports, tools, situations, or methods for ethics-focused practice based on the collection

described by Chivukula et al. [

]. Drawing from this existing content analysis of 63 ethics-focused methods

through a set of derived descriptors, we built on the two proposed types of “cores” of a method, which included:

Manuscript submitted to ACM

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ScaffoldingEthics-FocusedMethodsforPracticeResonanceCOLINM.GRAY,PurdueUniversity,USASHRUTHISAICHIVUKULA,IndianaUniversity,USATHOMASCARLOCKandZIQINGLI,PurdueUniversity,USAJA-NAEDUANE,BentleyUniversity,DepartmentsofInformationandProcessManagement,USANumerousmethodsandtoolshavebeenproposedtomotivateors...

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