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Encountering ethics through design: a workshop with nonhuman participants

Published: 01 September 2021 Publication History

Abstract

What if we began to speculate that intelligent things have an ethical agenda? Could we then imagine ways to move past the moral divide ‘human vs. nonhuman’ in those contexts, where things act on our behalf? Would this help us better address matters of agency and responsibility in the design and use of intelligent systems? In this article, we argue that if we fail to address intelligent things as objects that deserve moral consideration by their relations within a broad social context, we will lack a grip on the distinct ethical rules governing our interaction with intelligent things, and how to design for it. We report insights from a workshop, where we take seriously the perspectives offered by intelligent things, by allowing unforeseen ethical situations to emerge in an improvisatory manner. By giving intelligent things an active role in interaction, our participants seemed to be activated by the artifacts, provoked to act and respond to things beyond the artifact itself—its direct functionality and user experience. The workshop helped to consider autonomous behavior not as a simplistic exercise of anthropomorphization, but within the more significant ecosystems of relations, practices and values of which intelligent things are a part.

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    Information & Contributors

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    Published In

    cover image AI & Society
    AI & Society  Volume 36, Issue 3
    Sep 2021
    397 pages

    Publisher

    Springer-Verlag

    Berlin, Heidelberg

    Publication History

    Published: 01 September 2021
    Accepted: 12 October 2020
    Received: 18 August 2020

    Author Tags

    1. Experimental ethics
    2. More-than-human design
    3. Research through design
    4. Speculative design
    5. Thing ethnography

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    • Malmö University

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    • (2023)The Intricacies of Social Robots: Secondary Analysis of Fictional Documentaries to Explore the Benefits and Challenges of Robots in Complex Social SettingsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581526(1-13)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2023)The Entoptic Field Camera as Metaphor-Driven Research-through-Design with AI TechnologiesProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581175(1-19)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2022)Making Access: Increasing Inclusiveness in MakingExtended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491101.3503696(1-5)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
    • (2021)Who needs to know what, when?: Broadening the Explainable AI (XAI) Design Space by Looking at Explanations Across the AI LifecycleProceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3461778.3462131(1591-1602)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2021
    • (2021)Making Everyday Things Talk: Speculative Conversations into the Future of Voice Interfaces at HomeExtended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411763.3450390(1-16)Online publication date: 8-May-2021

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