Design Courts: Workshops for Exploring Emerging Technology Ethics
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Although it is now well recognized that HCI must take a greater account of ethics there is little consensus about which ethical systems are most appropriate or how to incorporate them into the design process. In this paper, we contribute a Design Court workshop method where opposing legal and ethical arguments are set against one another in the form of a mock trial. We describe how we structured and enacted these workshops by combining legal thought experiments and design fiction. The paper reports findings from three Design Courts where a fictional device is the subject of litigation. These court disputations focused on issues of privacy, reciprocity and intent in rich and nuanced debate. We argue that Design Courts may be a useful method for engaging competing ethical standpoints through contested dialogue.
Authors: Namrata Primlani, Mark Blythe, Justin Marshall
Institution: Northumbria University
Language: English
Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4409746268