Using Design Fiction To Teach Ethics In Design

Preparing Design Students To Be Ethical Entreprenuers By Studying The Implications Of Speculative Futures
paper_image_oracle.jpg
Preparing Design Students To Be Ethical Entreprenuers By Studying The Implications Of Speculative Futures
Raja Schaar & Chris Baeza
Drexel University

Using Design Fiction To Teach Ethics In Design

Preparing Design Students To Be Ethical Entreprenuers By Studying The Implications Of Speculative Futures
paper_image_oracle.jpg

How do we teach Design in the face of an ethical awakening when issues of climate change are complicated by political turmoil, social injustice, and food insecurity; where advances in technology come laden with concerns over surveillance, data privacy, equity, and dependence? What if designers were less concerned with driving the economy, but instead designing a better planet? What if design education pushed students to identify problems that don’t exist yet by connecting their understanding of history,  society, technology, and design to provoke, interrogate, and shape the future by grounding themselves in the study of ethics and design futures. How might we adapt tools and instructional models of entrepreneurship to create a framework to navigate these concepts. By looking to a design project framework that combines case studies of science fiction, speculative design, and social entrepreneurship, the authors seek to introduce ethical worldviews in the context of design to answer this overarching question: are designers better prepared after graduation when ethics and entrepreneurship are an integral part of design curricula? How can the context and concepts of design fictions allow students space to conceptualize, explore, and critique design ideas through an ethical lens?

 

Year: 2020