Output details

Education to practice: the development of responsibility in product designers

This output combines themes of design ethics and design education in presenting an empirically founded model of how ethical responsibility develops through education and into design practice. The output derives from research in the area of design responsibility and the work it presents synthesizes two refereed international conference papers (International Association for Societies of Design Research (IASDR) 2009 and International Engineering and Product Design Education (IEPDE) 2008). Previous research attempting to determine concepts of responsibility in design have been limited by the use of standard questionnaire methodologies, eliciting idealized responses to questions. The major contribution of this paper is in developing a methodology, based on card sorting and repertory grids, that better fits with the way that product designers express their thoughts and is thus more accurate for determining conceptions of responsibility. The longitudinal scope of the paper, taking snapshots of representative samples of designers at different career stages, is also something of significance as it suggests a developmental model of design where expertise consists in a growing ethical awareness and responsibility.