UNPRINCIPLED.

Illustration: The Non-Identity Problem. A series of increasingly smaller hands proceed into the distance, symbolising the impacts of our actions on the future

ethics for designers

Hooray for design! 🙌 We’re the good guys! 😀 Or are we? 😬

Unprincipled is an ethics training resource for designers. It’s a series of fun interactive thought experiments designed to blow open our hunches, intuitions and assumptions about the ethics of design:
– Are we the good guys?
– How would we know if we weren’t?
– Are we making the world a better place?
– Is that my responsibility?
– What about consumerism, and the climate crisis, and equality, and justice and…?
– But I’ve got bills to pay and mouths to feed!
– And A.I. has its eye on my job.

0% answers promised. The aim is to support and equip us as a community of designers to feel more confident in asking the right kind of questions as we wrestle with challenges together.

Click here to download a printable pdf of the Unprincipled worksheets

print at home

The worksheets have been designed to be printed large scale double-sided on A3 landscape format paper for group workshops. But they should work just as well at smaller scale.

Fold each printed sheet vertically into thirds, so that:

  • the numbered A and B versions of each thought experiment are visible on the outside,
  • the additional information about each thought experiment can be read when the first fold is opened,
  • the activity prompts are revealed with the full opening of the sheet.

free to use and evolve

The Unprincipled design ethics thought experiment workshop resources are offered freely for your use and adaptation under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

We’d love to hear about your experience of using/evolving the resource. If you’ve found it useful, have any thoughts of suggestions, or just want to talk more about design ethics, please do get in touch.

about

The Unprincipled design ethics thought experiment workshop resources have been developed by Peter Buwert and collaborators over a number of years in educational and professional design contexts.

Peter’s contact details at Edinburgh Napier University and more information on this design ethics research can be found here.

Published Research

Buwert, P., Bianchin, M., & Heylighen, A. (2020). Exploring Philosophical Devices for Thinking About Ethics in Socially Engaged Design: Reflections on a Workshop. Socially Engaged Design Conference 2019 p.91-101

Buwert, P., and Sinclair, M. (2024) Thought Experiments In The Ethics Of Designing For Future People., in Gray, C., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.518