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Ethical Situations in Service Design : An Explorative Study of how Service Designers Handle Ethically Loaded Situations During the Design Process

Previous studies have shown that ethically loaded design sit- uations within design currently present themselves as an implicit and non-reflexive activity. Others promote a development of ethi- cal tools which are incorporated within the normal set of methods and tools used during the design process. Within the service de- sign discipline no such research has been identified. In order to shed a light on the ethics within service design this thesis explores the ethical design ecology of service design and gives a first sketch of an ethical baseline for the field. The data collected in the study represents five weeks of shadowing in-house and external service design consultants working in Scandinavia. The data was analyzed by means of the three major normative theories within ethics and the Value-Sensitive Design framework. The analysis tools were ap- plied through a three step process where situations first were iden- tified, then the value-sensitive situations were flagged by means of the VSD-framework. Finally these value-sensitive situations were looked at from an ethical perspective using the three major ethical normative theories, consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. The results demonstrate that service designers often approach eth- ical problems in an implicit and ethically consequentialist way and that when ethical situations are dealt with explicitly they are often of a nature in which the consequences of the proposed design solution easily can be foreseen.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-74622
Date January 2012
CreatorsCarlsson, Bertil
PublisherLinköpings universitet, Institutionen för datavetenskap, Linköpings universitet, Filosofiska fakulteten
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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