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A.E.I.O.YOU: Vowels of Ethics

Toolkit for Ethics in Technology and Design Practice

Technology and Design Practice needs Ethics and the actors involved in the space, our practitioners need reflective tools to learn about their ethical awareness, responsibility, and trajectory. Ethics in practice is heavily dependent on a relational ontology of artifacts in use/ created, ecological aspects, and individual/ interactional qualities of the practitioners. Hence, introducing the A.E.I.O.YOU: Vowels of Ethics toolkit, currently consisting of four tools. The vowels in the A.E.I.O.YOU toolkit describe flavors that evoke and surface various kinds of support needed by technology and design practitioners to investigate:

  • A--Artifacts for support for practitioner’s ethical engagement.

  • E--Ecological Factors and Complexity that the practitioner is a part of.

  • I--Interactions with other practitioners during ethical engagement.

  • O--Other practitioners and their responsibility in ethical decision making.

  • YOU--YOU refers to individual practitioners, their ethical awareness, responsibility, and action, both within and beyond ecological, professional role-focused, and disciplinary borders.

“I want to reflect about my ethical position and responsibility and needs for support”

Avg. 15-30 minutes (per toolkit)

4 Toolkits

UX Designers/ Researchers, Software Engineers, Product Managers, Data Scientists, Hardware Engineers

  • UX Designer said...

    “By using the toolkit - the process of mapping all the in-house and third-party actors, factors influencing my design process, values such as accessibility, my role to deliver user interfaces, and seeing how everything connects with the policies, helped me look at the bigger picture. I guess I tend to not be a big picture thinker. I’m very much in the weeds. I am not always thinking about my ethical self-awareness.”

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Get in touch.

I will be happy to hear your thoughts/ feedback/ ideas about other reflective toolkits needed for technology and design practitioners. I am also willing to get in touch about conducting workshops with your design teams in industry. You can “Get in Touch!” with me through the Google form (below) or the website form (on the right).

Collaboration with graduate assistant Shikha Mehta @ Pratt Institute working on the evaluation and dissemination of the toolkit.

Thank you for all the feedback and support through the toolkit designs to my fantastic advisor Dr. Colin M. Gray @ UXP2 Lab. Acknowledgement to a well-deserving graduate student Lavanya Subramanian for her support with graphic design work on the website design.