Cultivating Responsible Design with the Product Impact Tool

Abstract

Industrial Design Engineers have a social responsibility by the very nature of their activities, bringing new products and services into the world of the user. Within the design related research chairs of our university we strive to shape this responsibility in the context of the design of Human Technology Relations. This paper will report on the experiences with teaching responsible design in the context of an Industrial Design Engineering Master's course "Create the Future". In this course student groups explore the future of a specific design domain by means of future scenario development. In the course, the potential impacts of future design interventions are actively explored by means of the Product Impact Tool. This is a framework, derived from Philosophy of Technology and User Centred Design that addresses the multitude of impact types that technologies have on humans and human behaviour. In the course, the student groups analysed and evaluated their conceptual designs with the tool in a half-day workshop. Looking at the influence of the Product Impact Tool exercise on the final design results of the course, we can conclude that the use of the Product Impact Tool is valuable for the implementation of responsible design in design education.

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“…Traditional examples of SIA include surveys and questionnaires, workshops, community meetings, studies, advisory committees, and checklists. Conversely, digital examples of SIA applicable during the R&D phase include online tools such as the Product Impact Tool (https:// productimpacttool.org/) which guides the impact assessment of commercial and non-commercial products [100], the Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA; https://cta-toolbox.nl/) toolbox that lists different tools for technological assessment [101], and the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI; https://rri-tools.eu/) toolkit, which assists researchers in selecting the most fit-forpurpose RRI tool to implement [102].…”

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