I’ve been doing a lot of consultancy work again recently, specifically around transformation and education for the Co-op here in Manchester, UK.

We’ve been trying to show amongst other things how design works, how it’s different to people’s current ways of working in the wider business and why it can be useful to help understand or address issues they are having.

Part of this has been teaching existing methods and tools to people. …

I don’t believe that technology is bad, nor that the vast majority of the people (myself included) who design and develop technology based solutions have bad intentions. So what’s going on?

A lot of the social and societal problems we’re seeing at the moment in tech stem from a growing realisation that we either cannot foresee or don’t always fully understand and react to the secondary, or tertiary impacts (or as economists call them, externalities) of what we’re designing.

New regulations, such as GDPR, are shining a spotlight onto the issues and helping to bring how we treat people and…

2018 was an interesting year for the tech industry.

It was also an interesting year for Ethics Kit (but in a more positive way). I met and continue to meet a lot of new people from all over the world. We all seem to share common goals and frustrations and are working towards the same outcome. Personally, I have found this to be energising and exciting and hope that this continues to gather pace in 2019.

After a lot of deliberation around what we wanted to do and how best to do it, Ethics Kit finally formalised as an entity…

Last Thursday we held our first community design workshop at Hyper Island in Manchester, England.

We had a fantastic group of people in the room; representing a broad spectrum of skills and cultures across digital, education and academia. People even dialed in from Mumbai, India and even Sydney, Australia (it was 4:30am there!)

The kernel of our strategy at Ethics Kit is encouraging and empowering communication and collaboration across disciplines related to the design and development of technology. …

Edit: Since writing this article I’ve turned the process described below into a web app which helps designers, researchers and digital teams obtain and manage their informed consent, called Consent Kit. It guides you through this process and makes light work of some of the more admin heavy aspects of doing the right thing.

Informed consent differs from traditional consent in that it moves beyond template forms and a signature. Fundamentally, it lets the participant know who you are, why they’re involved and what you’re going to do with the information they choose to share with you.

This additional transparency…

I’ve spent the last three months working on an independent research project as the final part of an MA in Digital Experience Design with the lovely people at Common Good in Manchester, England.

I’ve been taking a deeper look at ethics; what considerations are applicable to designers, how ethical review could be implemented into a design process and most importantly — why would you in the first place?

There’s a weird stigma around ethics. It’s not something that anyone would openly admit too — after all, ethics is widely associated with being and doing inherent good. A co-worker recently summed…

I’ve spent the last three months working on an independent research project as the final part of an MA in Digital Experience Design with the lovely people at Common Good in Manchester, England.

My research has been primarily concerned with the ethical complexities which could arise when working with vulnerable people in the design process. One thing which I’ve come to realise is that there is no magic bullet when it comes to ethics in any field. …

I’ve spent the last three months working on an independent research project as the final part of an MA in Digital Experience Design with the lovely people at Common Good in Manchester, England.

The overarching theme of my research has been investigating the ethical complexities that arise when working with vulnerable people in the design process. One of the sub themes of my research, and how I arrived at the subject of this article was:

How might ethical considerations throughout the design process lead to better insights?

A lot of people have been talking about empathy recently, myself included. I…