Dr Luke Moffat
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University
Luke Moffat is a Philosopher interested in ethics of technology, mobilities, and speculative futures. He has taught and researched in Film Studies, Philosophy, Politics, and Sociology departments. His current work examines the assemblages of ethical, legal and social issues in the designs, perceptions, and uses of autonomous cars.
isITethical? Ethics through Design in IT innovation
Innovation in networked technologies, including big data, AI, and communications, is rapid and pervasive. Regulation, standardisation, policy making, and governance struggle to keep pace. As unintended consequences proliferate, ethical considerations are all too often pressed through tick box exercises, and ethics is perceived as a barrier to innovation and creativity; standing in the way of ‘solutions’ to health or security or environmental problems.
But there is an urgent need to notice, and constructively address ethical tensions in the proliferation of digital systems. We have developed isITethical? Exchange, a community platform and knowledge base, that facilitates engagement between academics, industry technology designers, and practitioners.
Through the isITethical? platform, we have formulated an Ethics through Design (EtD) approach. This is a collaborative and creative methodology that approaches ethics as a continuous and constitutive part of the process of innovation, from perceptions of challenges, to design and end use. EtD uses Design Research and playful Art Thinking methods to support Knowledge Exchange and ethical reflections for responsible innovation.
What is more, ethics through design renders the design processes and agents of innovation response-able in the sense of sensitizing them to ethical challenges and opportunities in ways that fosters ambitious and circumspect innovation, for example utilising accountable data-mining, privacy preserving techniques, or explainable AI approaches.
To showcase EtD in action, we present experiences from a range of collaborative workshops with practitioners in healthcare and public protection and disaster response, Small and Medium Size Enterprise (SME) and industry technology developers.
Presenting results from these workshops, we show how EtD as a way of doing ethics with others offers an agile, contextual, creative and collaborative ethics for responsible, and response-able IT innovation.
Dr. Luke Moffat, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University
Dr. Malé Lujan Escalante, Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, University of Bristol
Prof. Monika Buscher, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University