We are thrilled to be presenting our Scoping Review of Ethics Across SIGCHI .
We hope this short video entices you to read the full paper later.
We also hope our work inspires many others seeking to understand how ethics can be applied
to designing interactive systems.
We will start by explaining our motivation to conduct this scoping review.
Digital technologies have the capacity to affect human lives at ever-increasing scales
and in ever more intimate ways.
Algorithmic bias, political interference, hate speech, misuse of personal data, deceptive
interfaces.
Without a substantial commitment to ethics, interaction design fails to consider fundamental
aspects of human existence, such as freedom, fairness and welfare.
It is clear that there is a pressing need for researchers and designers to acquire knowledge
and find ways to engage with the concept of ethics.
Ethics can be understood as the search for guiding references to drive responsible choices
for complex questions of the implications of digital innovation.
Ethics refers to the act of remaining responsive to the possibly undesirable futures enabled
through careless design and research decisions.
We conducted the following scoping review to understand better how to put ethics into
practice in our own work.
A scoping review is a systematic description of previous research about a topic.
It is an effective method for identifying knowledge gaps and clarifying concepts across
a body of literature.
The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the landscape of ethics across SIGCHI to
support professionals looking to fortify orientations towards ethical thinking and doing.
We searched the ACM Digital Library for full-length publications at conferences sponsored by SIGCHI
between 2010 and 2020.
Our search query targeted papers with ethic* within the title, abstract or authors keywords.
The evidence sources gathered through this method were analysed to answer the following
questions:
Which ethical considerations, technologies and user groups have been the subjects of
the published papers
Which approaches, methods and theories have been employed to explore ethical considerations
in these publications
And what practical recommendations for putting ethics into action have been reported and
discussed?
We now highlight some of the key findings we got in this review.
We have identified 461 articles through our search strategy.
After these articles were screened, 129 papers were included in the sample.
The vast majority of these papers have been published at CHI, with publications from DIS
composing the second largest group.
We have identified a growing trend in the number of papers about ethics, especially
in the last three years.
Regarding the ethical considerations discussed in these papers, we found that they most often
speak of three main groups of concerns: autonomy violations, potential harm to users well-being
and social injustice.
We found that discussions about artificial intelligence applications are predominant
in the sample in terms of technology types.
Most papers have children, workers and patients as target user groups, while fewer papers
focus on minorities and rural populations.
Regarding approaches to exploring such ethical concerns, we have found that most papers apply
participatory and qualitative methods to collect empirical data.
When it comes to theoretical orientations, value-sensitive design and critical design
are the frameworks most frequently employed.
Several practical recommendations for putting ethics into action have been reported and
discussed.
Researchers are advised to reflect on informed consent procedures, provide direct benefits
for participants, foster inclusion and diversity and respond to signs of distress.
User experience designers are advised to support more transparent communication, consider mechanisms
for data control, consult domain experts and become aware of how products can perpetuate
systems of oppression.
Ethics is perceived as an individual and collective responsibility.
Professionals are advised to remain mindful of their choices, and users should be made
aware of the risks of technology adoption.
Ethics education is promoted by many, but the role of regulations and policies is advised
to be critically discussed.
The paper details these and additional insights obtained through the review.
To conclude this video, we want to highlight some takeaway points that summarise the implications
of our findings.
First of all, technology creation and adoption can unfairly affect not only personal but
also socio-political spheres of human life.
Building more ethical systems can start by integrating ethical lenses into well-known
user-centred design methods.
However, no single framework offers definitive answers; theory helps capture divergent viewpoints
for robust argumentation.
Unfortunately, without harmony across the roles of organisations and regulatory entities,
it is challenging for individual professionals to act.
As a final reflection, some may wonder why we should dare to care about ethics in the
first place.
Committing to ethical thinking means leaving behind a position of indifference for a path
rarely permissive of definitive answers.
However, we may find the motivation to recognise that this is perhaps the only means of pursuing
and achieving the human flourishing for which HCI has striven all along.
Inhabiting privileged positions as producers and propagators of knowledge, we have a shared
responsibility to shape our actions so that they serve not only our own goals but the
common good, in solidarity with the aspirations of those who comprise our surroundings and,
indeed, the planet.
Thank you for watching this video and please reach out to us if you want to continue this
discussion afterwards.