These days, the new technologies we design extend their reach far beyond a person’s touch—they connect and communicate with one another, they make decisions, they generate interpretations of the world they sense. As designers, we “ought” to think through the kinds of behaviours and worlds we want to nurture when we make new things. Yet it can be hard to see such bigger impacts until the things break, go down, confuse, mis-categorise.

How might we bring ethics up before things go down?

Annelie will share her approach of using ethical theories to question and re-imagine our designs, now and in the futures.

Understand foundational ethical theories and how they relate to design and technology

• Understand the role of data in connected products and their ecosystems
• Apply futurescaping methods to meet the challenge of unpredictable outcomes of new technology

Artwork by Meech Boakye

If you have time beforehand—reflect on an object that represents ethics to you. We will share these in the session.

Part 1
Overview of 3 key theories, told through stories and contextualised with a common new technological product

Part 2
Hands-on work with 1-3 ethical tools (ranging from values articulation to scenario trees), apply them to our common product

Part 3
Share-back and wrap-up

Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues

Cennyd Bowles, Future Ethics

Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds

Anab Jain, Why we need to imagine different futures

Gillian Crampton-Smith, Behind every artifact lurks an ideology

This workshop is being offered on a sliding scale basis, but if none of the options are affordable for you, please send us an email and we’ll try to work something out

Annelie Berner is an independent researcher and interaction designer based in Copenhagen. In her work, she bridges science, academia and the public, creating experiences of research topics that range from ethics of new technologies to climate science and futures. She has served as the Principal Investigator at CIID Research (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design) on EU-H2020 research projects. Annelie’s work has won multiple honours in the Core77 Design Awards for Strategy & Research, Speculative Design, Design Education Initiative, Design for Social Impact, Built Environments and Food Design, as well has having exhibited at the World Health Organisation, Red Bull Studios, The Georgia Museum of Art and Ars Electronica. She is a founding member of NEWINC, the New Museum’s incubator for artists, technologists and designers. Annelie graduated from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and studied Government and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard.