Design decisions are often framed as technical or evidence-based choices, yet they are ethical choices, too. Whether you are working on digital products or physical spaces, designers routinely make judgments under constraints--balancing standards, stakeholders, company pressures, and competing values. In this keynote, Dr. Colin Gray discusses the most important challenges facing us are not abstract ethical dilemmas but our everyday design decisions.
Drawing up extensive research on everday ethics in design decisions, Dr. Gray looks at how values embed routine decisions, our workflows, and everyday experiences. These values are often viewed as "good" design, too. We'll examine research on deceptive or manipulative design practices (also known as dark patterns) across domains, normalization of harm and surveillance, quiet influence of incentives, and how professional judgment shapes what is taught, measured, and rewarded.
We'll examine how leaders and educators, sharing work on ethics-based design methods, tradeoffs, responsibilities, and consequences of design decisions. Rather than treat ethics as constraints or exceptions, let's position ethical engagement as what it means to make good design decisions that account for social impact the future of our design profession.