As computing's societal impact grows, so does the need for computing students to recognize and address the ethical and sociotechnical implications of their work. While there are efforts to integrate ethics into computing curricula, we lack a standardized tool to measure those efforts, specifically, students' attitudes towards ethical reflection and their ability to effect change. This paper introduces the novel framework of Critically Conscious Computing and reports on the development and content validation of the Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing Index, a novel instrument designed to assess undergraduate computing students' attitudes towards practicing critically conscious computing. The resulting index is a theoretically grounded, expert-reviewed tool to support research and practice in computing ethics education. This enables researchers and educators to gain insights into students' perspectives, inform the design of targeted ethics interventions, and measure the effectiveness of computing ethics education initiatives.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713189
Although it is now well recognized that HCI must take a greater account of ethics there is little consensus about which ethical systems are most appropriate or how to incorporate them into the design process. In this paper, we contribute a Design Court workshop method where opposing legal and ethical arguments are set against one another in the form of a mock trial. We describe how we structured and enacted these workshops by combining legal thought experiments and design fiction. The paper reports findings from three Design Courts where a fictional device is the subject of litigation. These court disputations focused on issues of privacy, reciprocity and intent in rich and nuanced debate. We argue that Design Courts may be a useful method for engaging competing ethical standpoints through contested dialogue.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713774
Existing ethics frameworks for participatory engagement in HCI often overlook the nuanced ethical challenges of dynamic community-based contexts given the latter’s relational nature. We hope to bridge this gap by grounding feminist care ethics in actionable tools for community-based projects to enhance ethical engagement in these settings. Prior research advocates for adaptable, context-sensitive ethics in participatory research, informed by feminist care ethics. To address this need, we developed and iteratively refined a toolkit embodying the underlying principles of feminist care ethics through workshops with participants working in academic and non-academic community-based settings. Our findings suggest that the toolkit fosters ethical reflection aligned with the feminist care ethics ethos while facilitating meaningful experiences for participants. This work contributes to the field by offering a practical design artefact that not only embodies feminist care ethics but also supports researchers and communities in navigating complex ethical landscapes in participatory engagements, together or independently.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713950
Friction -- disagreement and breakdown -- is an omnipresent aspect of conducting interdisciplinary research yet is rarely presented in formal research reporting. We analyse a performance-led research process where professional dancers with different disabilities explored how to improvise with an industrial robot, with the support of an interdisciplinary team of human-computer and human-robot interaction researchers. We focus on one site of friction in our research process; how to dance -- safely -- with robots? By presenting our research process, we exemplify the different ways in which we encountered this friction and how we reconfigured the research process around it. We contribute five ways in which we arrived at a generative ethical outcome, which may be helpful in productively engaging with friction in interdisciplinary collaboration.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3714123
Social activities in long-term care homes help promote residents’ wellbeing, but their effectiveness depends on residents’ engagement. To identify design opportunities for promoting meaningful engagement, we conducted an ethnographic study on organised activities in an Australian aged care home. We observed staff fostered engagement by initiating conversations, weaving residents’ backgrounds into interactions, and adapting activities to residents’ varying abilities. However, challenges included new staff members’ unfamiliarity with residents, multi-tasking, and insufficient support to engage excluded residents. Using a care ethics lens that includes relational, situated and empathetic features of care, we show that meaningful engagement is shaped by the ethical care practices embedded in staff-resident interactions and highlight opportunities for technologies to mitigate barriers hindering staff from providing ethical care in existing activities. These opportunities include: collecting and recording residents’ interests, providing conversation prompts, enhancing activity inclusiveness, and reducing language and cultural barriers.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713755
A plethora of toolkits, checklists, and workshops have been developed to bridge the well-documented gap between AI ethics principles and practice. Yet little is known about effects of such interventions on practitioners. We conducted an ethnographic investigation in a major European city organization that developed and works to integrate an ethics toolkit into city operations. We find that the integration of ethics tools by technical teams destabilises their boundaries, roles, and mandates around responsibilities and decisions. This lead to emotional discomfort and feelings of vulnerability, which neither toolkit designers nor the organization had accounted for. We leverage the concept of moral stress to argue that this affective experience is a core challenge to the successful integration of ethics tools in technical practice. Even in this best case scenario, organisational structures were not able to deal with moral stress that resulted from attempts to implement responsible technology development practices.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713264
Integrating ethics education in human-computer interaction (HCI) programs is critical to training responsible industry practitioners. Yet, there is a lack of practical educator-focused resources, which facilitate reflection on personal approaches to ethics education. We conducted a series of nine generative participatory workshops with 15 educators to explore, design and seek feedback on the Ethics Reflexivity Canvas as a pedagogical resource. The canvas makes the educator and learner positionality explicit to develop ethical sensitivity, sensitise and situate a pedagogical plan, and iterate and adapt over time. However, our findings suggest that educators experience tensions, depending on their pedagogical approach. We contribute insight on how resources can align with education work in HCI, help educators reflect on a plurality of approaches to ethics, use accessible language to stimulate curiosity towards ethics, and provide scaffolding to operationalize collaborative and personal exploration.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713574