Designing for ethical innovation: A case study on ELSI co-design in emergency

Abstract

The ever more pervasive 'informationalization' of crisis management and response brings both unprecedented opportunities and challenges. Recent years have seen the emergence of attention to ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) in the field of Information and Communication Technology. However, disclosing (and addressing) ELSI issues in design is still a challenge because they are inherently relational, arising from interactions between people, the material and design of the artifact, and the context. In this article, we discuss approaches for addressing such 'deeper' and 'wider' political implications, values and ethical, legal and social implications that arise between practices, people and technology. Based on a case study from the BRIDGE project, which has provided the opportunity for deep engagement with these issues through the concrete exploration and experimentation with technologically augmented practices of emergency response, we present insights from our int erdisciplinary work aiming to make design and innovation projects ELSI-aware. Crucially, we have seen in our study a need for a shift from privacy by design towards designing for privacy, collaboration, trust, accessibility, ownership, transparency etc., acknowledging that these are emergent practices that we cannot control by design, but rather that we can help to design for-calling for approaches that allow to make ELSI issues explicit and addressable in design-time

Gaming for Introducing Social Challenges and Responsibility to Young People

“…This correlates with the structure of the recursive system, from which it is evident that the higher-level goals should be aligned with the goals at the lower levels in order for the system to survive (Espejo et al, 1999). They lead to participatory approaches in co-designing products, services, and the internal processes by all stakeholders (Liegl et al, 2016).…”

Practices and politics of collaborative urban infrastructuring: Traffic Light Box Artworks in Dublin Streets

“…Further articulating concerns that arise in the context of collaborating with the public to reshape the city, I also drawn on participatory approaches to design, especially on information infrastructure, to pay particular attention towards how material and technological arrangements of prototypes, trials or workshops can cause concerns to the social and ethical potentials that these collaborative experiments set out to achieve (Björgvinsson et al, 2010;Karasti and Baker, 2008;Liegl et al, 2016). These approaches are combined in the paper to destabilise the government as the centre of knowledge, expertise and technology, and also to disassemble 'the government' for analysing the relocation of innovation into the context of urban everyday life and the promises and politics that occur during the process.…”

“…This re-orientation of research emphases builds on the problematisation of the privileged institutions, including governments and research and industrial hubs, in design and innovation and the relocation of sites of innovation and experimentation into everyday life contexts and practices (Liegl et al, 2016;Suchman, 2011).…”

Charting the design and implementation of the smart city: the case of citizen-centric bikeshare in Hamilton, Ontario

“…Using instrumentalization theory, we trace the contextual history of SobiHamilton, highlighting how the scheme unfolded in contingent and relational ways that sought to co-opt citizen views rather than tracking a purely top-down, teleological path. As such, we make a contribution not only to debates in critical urban geography, but also to previous scholarship in critical design (see for example, Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013;Kitchin et al, 2016;Liegl et al, 2016;Perng, 2019;Schliwa, 2019).…”