Ethical Situations in Service Design: An Explorative Study of how Service Designers Handle Ethically Loaded Situations During the Design Process
2012 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (Two Years)), 20 credits / 30 HE credits
Student thesis
Abstract [en]
Previous studies have shown that ethically loaded design sit- uations within design currently present themselves as an implicit and non-reflexive activity. Others promote a development of ethi- cal tools which are incorporated within the normal set of methods and tools used during the design process. Within the service de- sign discipline no such research has been identified. In order to shed a light on the ethics within service design this thesis explores the ethical design ecology of service design and gives a first sketch of an ethical baseline for the field. The data collected in the study represents five weeks of shadowing in-house and external service design consultants working in Scandinavia. The data was analyzed by means of the three major normative theories within ethics and the Value-Sensitive Design framework. The analysis tools were ap- plied through a three step process where situations first were iden- tified, then the value-sensitive situations were flagged by means of the VSD-framework. Finally these value-sensitive situations were looked at from an ethical perspective using the three major ethical normative theories, consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. The results demonstrate that service designers often approach eth- ical problems in an implicit and ethically consequentialist way and that when ethical situations are dealt with explicitly they are often of a nature in which the consequences of the proposed design solution easily can be foreseen.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2012. , p. 76
Keywords [en]
Service Design, Ethics, Ethical Service Design Ecology, Value-Sensitive Design, Value-Sensitive Situations
National Category
Human Computer Interaction
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-74622ISRN: LIU-IDA/KOGVET-A–12/003–SEOAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-74622DiVA, id: diva2:488880
Subject / course
Cognitive science programme
Presentation
2011-11-30, Alan Turing, Linköping, 15:00 (Swedish)
Uppsok
Technology
Supervisors
Examiners
2012-02-022012-02-022018-01-12Bibliographically approved