Ethics for Design Students: A Framework of Ethical Competence to Scaffold Course Planning

Abstract

DescriptionThe necessity to educate applied ethics to engineering students is well established in literature but the practice in higher education is trailing behind. A key question is how to introduce ethical contents relevant to specific fields and in pedagogically effective ways. This article focuses on students of human-centric design in the context of software development, a diverse group of future experts who ought to address complex human concerns in software systems through responsibilities like requirements engineering, service design and user experience design. The article presents a framework of developing designers' ethical competence at four tiers (awareness, responsibility, practice, methods) and offers examples of relevant contents and pedagogical choices to support learning. The framework is based on the author's experiences of developing a course for a multi-disciplinary and multicultural audience of Master students in human-computer interaction and IT for sustainable development. It is intended to help scaffold course planning primarily for design students, but may also inform ethics education in computer science, software production and engineering in general.