Advancing Ethical Practices in Participatory Design

Participatory design initiatives, particularly in the field of digital civics, are often co-developed with the citizens and communities they aim to assist. Digital civics research seeks to create positive social change through various digital technologies and typically employs embedded processes, such as commissioning models. However, despite the widespread adoption of these processes across different domains, there is currently no established framework for best practices and accountability procedures to ensure ethical engagement with citizens and the sustainability of our projects.  

To address this gap, we submitted a workshop proposal to PDC 2024 in Sarawak, Malaysia, aimed at providing a collaborative space for participants to construct a dynamic framework of best practices. This workshop lays the groundwork for the future of sustainable embedded research processes, with the overarching goal of fostering discussions and sharing insights that contribute to the development of effective practices, ensuring the longevity and impact of participatory digital civics projects. 

In conjunction, we conducted another workshop at DIS 2024 in Copenhagen, which advocated for a dynamic, community-led approach to ethics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) by integrating principles from feminist HCI and digital civics. Traditional ethics in HCI often overlook interpersonal considerations, resulting in static frameworks that are ill-equipped to address the complexities of dynamic social contexts and power dynamics. 

Drawing from feminist perspectives, this workshop aimed to develop a meta-toolkit for community-led feminist ethics, fostering collaborative research practices grounded in feminist ethical principles. Through pre-workshop activities, interactive sessions, and post-workshop discussions, participants engaged in dialogue to advance community-led ethical research practices. This initiative also sought to strengthen the interdisciplinary community of researchers and practitioners interested in ethics, digital civics, and feminist HCI. By fostering a reflexive approach to ethics, the workshop contributes to the discourse on design’s role in shaping future interactions between individuals, communities, and technology. 

This ongoing project is a collaborative effort involving Anna Carter and Kyle Montague, from the Centre for Digital Citizens, Northumbria University; Reem Talhouk and Angelika Strohmayer from the School of Design, Northumbria University; Hugo Nicolau and Ana O. Henriques from the DCitizens Project at the Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa; Tiffany Knearem from Google; Ceylan Besevli from University College London; Firaz Peer from the University of Kentucky; Clara Crivellaro from the Centre for Digital Citizens, Open Lab, Newcastle University; and Sarah Ruller from the DCitizens project at the University of Siegen; Cayley Macarthur from the University of Waterloo, Shaowen Bardzell from the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Colin M. Gray from Indiana University Bloomington, and Eleonore Fournier-Tombs from the UNU Centre for Policy Research. 

What is the impact? 

This project resulted in the ACM publication of a workshop paper at PDC 2024, the bi-annual Participatory Design Conference in Sarawak, Malaysia, as well as an ACM publication of a workshop paper at DIS 2024, the annual Designing Interactive Systems Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. We are currently working on follow-up publications focused on the content and methodologies emerging from these discussions and publications. 

• Anna R. L. Carter, Ana O. Henriques, Hugo Nicolau, Kyle Montague, Reem Talhouk, Tiffany Knearem, Ceylan Besevli, Firaz Peer, Clara Crivellaro, and Sarah Ruller. 2024. Envisioning Collaborative Futures: Advancing the Frontiers of Embedded Research. In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2024: Exploratory Papers and Workshops - Volume 2 (PDC '24), Vol. 2. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 190–193. https://doi.org/10.1145/3661455.3669890 

Ana O Henriques, Hugo Nicolau, Anna R. L. Carter, Kyle Montague, Reem Talhouk, Angelika Strohmayer, Sarah Rüller, Cayley Macarthur, Shaowen Bardzell, Colin M. Gray, and Eleonore Fournier-Tombs. 2024. Fostering Feminist Community-Led Ethics: Building Tools and Connections. In Companion Publication of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '24 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 424–428. https://doi.org/10.1145/3656156.3658385