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Felt Ethics: Reimagining Ethics in Human-Technology Relations

Published: 01 July 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Ethical sensibilities are constantly enacted in design practice. As we move towards pluralistic ways of designing, different ethical sensibilities increasingly merge, diverge, and diffract. It becomes vital to attend to the implicit ethics that imbue design practice to envision alternative practices and generative epistemics for the interaction design discipline. My research develops felt ethics – an attitude of somatic, critical, and reflective attentiveness towards how our ethical sensibilities are engaged in design. I develop an understanding of ethical sensibilities as fundamentally relational and co-constitutional; shaped by factors such as our relationships with others, society, culture, politics, technologies, and materials. I discuss two ongoing project involving autonomous systems, using choreographic methods to explore ethical assumptions embedded in industrial robots and then reimagining such ethics using research through design. I conclude with open questions for the DIS 2024 Doctoral Consortium concerning the relation-making potential and resonance of felt ethics with other design practices.

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  1. Felt Ethics: Reimagining Ethics in Human-Technology Relations

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    DIS '24 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference
    July 2024
    501 pages
    ISBN:9798400706325
    DOI:10.1145/3656156
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 01 July 2024

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    Author Tags

    1. aesthetics
    2. ethics
    3. felt ethics
    4. soma design

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    • Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation

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    DIS '24: Designing Interactive Systems Conference
    July 1 - 5, 2024
    IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

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