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Presenting on Ethics Panel at EuroIA 2007
July 2, 2007 03:28 PM | Posted in: User Experience (UX)*Apologies for another announcement posting* but now that the program is final, I can mention that I'll be speaking at EuroIA 2007 in lovely Barcelona, as part of the panel Perspectives on Ethics, moderated by Olly Wright. My presentation discusses conflict and ethics as an aspect of design for social online environments.
I shared some initial thoughts on this (under served) area last year, in a short post titled Conflict-Aware Design: Accounting For Conflict In User Experiences. The essential message of this post - and the thing I'm thinking about most regarding the question of conflict - is "conflict equals interest, and interest should be a focus for design." The panel will be the forum for sharing promised (but not complete) follow-up postings.
While prepping the submission, I was working with this treatment for the topic.
Conflict is a fundamental component of human character and relations, with important ethical dimensions. Yet conflict rarely appears as an explicit consideration during the process of designing the experiences, architectures, systems, or environments that make up the new social and participatory media we use daily. Now that media are social, conflict is inevitable.
How can (or should) designers ethically address conflict within design efforts? Does an ethical framework for design require us to manage conflict in character and relations actively? What mechanisms or social structures should designers use to address conflict within new experiences? Are there new kinds of conflict created or necessitated by the social and participatory environments emerging now?
Some specific areas of discussion: privacy, identity, ownership, responsibility, speech.
I'd love any thoughts on the topic, the treatment, the implications, etc.
Fellow panelists at EuroIA include:
- Olly Wright, Media Catalyst, NL
- Thomas J. Froehlich, Kent State University, US
- special mystery panelist...
Barcelona is a magnificent city...
The full conference program is available at this address http://www.euroia.org/Programme.aspx, and the roster of speakers along is worth the trip to Barcelona.
And DrupalCon Barcelona happens at the same time - I wonder what sort of cross-pollination will emerge...?
Viva Catalunya!
local tags: barcelona, conflict, conflict_aware_design, design, ethics, euro_ia_2007, ux
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Joe,
Just a point which may be of interest; I find the Delphi technique to be useful in building consensus in potential conflict situations.
It works like this: you send out for feedback / input among a group of people, letting each know that he/she is responding individually. You then gather and aggregate the responses (this might be edited responses or average likert scores etc.), and send these back around to the individuals to affirm or disagree with. Again, you aggregate the responses, and send them out, and continue to do so until the responses become stable. Frankly, this tends to happen quite quickly.
The disadvantage of this technique is that it is quite fascist in blunting individual input, but then, that is generally the problem one is trying to overcome in disputes or conflicts.
Every person feels he/she has had an individual opportunity to comment, that his/her opinions have been taken account of, and that a mutually satisfying result has been agreed at.
I tend to use it in Projects for prioritising features or approaches, but it's very extensible.
I suppose it's a wee bit like a repeated card sort without the dendrograms!