The Turn to Practice in Design Ethics: Characteristics and Future Research Directions for HCI Research

2025-06-06

AI Summary

This paper responds to the “practice turn” in HCI design ethics research, addressing how ethical inquiry can be systematically advanced within dynamic, situated design activities. Through an interdisciplinary systematic review of literature from design studies, philosophy, and HCI, it demonstrates that ethics is not an external set of prescriptive norms but an embedded, collaborative, and cultivable process intrinsic to everyday design practice. The key contributions are threefold: (1) the first articulation of six practice-oriented future directions for design ethics; (2) the proposal of a novel paradigm—“ethics as practice, cultivable, and co-constructed”; and (3) the theoretical establishment of ethics as an inherent dimension of design. Collectively, these findings provide a theoretically grounded yet pragmatically actionable framework to position HCI as a leader in interdisciplinary design ethics research.

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Applications
• Machine Learning: Ethics, Bias, and Fairness
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

Abstract

As emerging technologies continue to shape society, there is a growing emphasis on the need to engage with design ethics as it unfolds in practice to better capture the complexities of ethical considerations embedded in day-to-day work. Positioned within the broader"turn to practice"in HCI, the review characterizes this body of work in terms of its motivations, conceptual frameworks, methodologies, and contributions across a range of design disciplines and academic databases. The findings reveal a shift away from static and abstract ethical frameworks toward an understanding of ethics as an evolving, situated, and inherent aspect of design activities, one that can be cultivated and fostered collaboratively. This review proposes six future directions for establishing common research priorities and fostering the field's growth. While the review promotes cross-disciplinary dialogue, we argue that HCI research, given its cumulative experience with practice-oriented research, is well-equipped to guide this emerging strand of work on design ethics.

Problem

• Shifting from static to dynamic ethical frameworks in design
• Exploring ethics as evolving and inherent in design practice
• Promoting cross-disciplinary dialogue on design ethics in HCI

Innovation

• Engaging with design ethics in practice
• Shifting from static to evolving ethical frameworks
• Promoting cross-disciplinary dialogue in HCI