Output details

Designing Games to Teach Ethics

This output reports research looking at how design students can be more effectively taught ethical concepts which was conducted during a new elective course for product designers and architects at the TU Delft in The Netherlands. An earlier version of the paper was peer reviewed and published at the International Engineering and Product Design Education conference in 2005. Ethical education for engineers is largely case-based and theoretical, unsuited to the reflective practice approach of design and architecture. The research developed a game environment where participants could experience the practice of ethics, rather than simply reason abstractly about ethical dilemmas. Over a three year period, 35 student participants took part, with a small sample of game sessions videoed to analyse the reasoning processes taking place. The main finding of the paper is in showing how it is possible to directly experience ethical consequences in an educational context, and how valuable that is to developing a sense of what ethics in design is about. What was also surprising is how, even in an environment that is ethically framed, there is very little explicit discussion of ethics. The findings of this paper have lead directly to more comprehensive studies across a range of design disciplines concerning the ‘implicit’ nature of ethical decision-making in the design process (Output 1 and Output 2)