Vom Abwägen und Entscheiden

00:00:26: Arno Görgen Herzlich willkommen, liebe Zuhörer:innen, zu Design, Macht, Gesellschaft, dem Forschungspodcast des Institute of Design Research in Bern. Mein Name ist Arno Görgen.

00:00:38: Eliane Gerber Und ich bin Eliane Gerber.

00:00:40: Arno Görgen Und wir haben es ja bereits letztes Mal angekündigt, unser Oberthema in dieser zweiten Staffel Design. Macht. Gesellschaft ist Ethik des Designs oder Designethik. Und um uns so ein bisschen in diese Materie einzufühlen, haben wir uns heute einen ganz besonderen Gast eingeladen. Eliane, wen haben wir denn hier? Eher, man muss sagen, virtuell die aktuell bei uns sitzen.

00:01:01: Eliane Gerber Paola Pierri ist Professorin für Social Design und stellvertretende Leiterin des Institute of Design Research an der Hochschule der Künste Bern. Sie hat einen Doktortitel in Design Anthropology und ist spezialisiert auf Design und Technologieanthropologie mit einem besonderen Forschungsschwerpunkt auf die Auswirkungen digitaler Technologien, auf Gesellschaften und auf die Demokratie im Allgemeinen. Vor ihrer jetzigen Tätigkeit war Paula Senior Researcher in Luzern, Forschungsleiterin bei Democratic Society, Associate Professor bei Polymy und Research Fellow am Weizenbaum Institut, wo sie zum Thema digitale Ungleichheiten forschte. Ihr Forschungsinteresse konzentriert sich auf verschiedene Elemente der Verbindung zwischen Digitalem und Demokratie. Von der Erforschung von Formen des digitalen Aktivismus und der Partizipation bis hin zur Untersuchung von Fragen der Gerechtigkeit und der Menschenrechte, die durch die zunehmende Digitalisierung des öffentlichen Raums entstehen oder verschärft werden. Wir switchen jetzt im Folgenden ins Englisch und sagen erst mal: Welcome to our little show, Paola.

00:02:14: Paola Pierri Thank you so much. Thanks Eliane, Thanks Arno for the invite. I'm very glad to be here.

00:02:20: Arno Görgen Hi Paula. Wow, what a CV you have. Is there anything you don't do in your free time?

00:02:30: Paola Pierri I do many things, and I guess this is one of the beauty and maybe the difficulty sometimes with social design. It is a very wide field, and I think also a field that is changing. As society faces different challenges, what you do in Social Design might be slightly different. So technologies came late, for instance, in my work. But since, I think now 2015 or 2016, I started working on issues of digitalization, as that became a huge issue for our societies.

00:03:04: Arno Görgen Before we really get into the matter, we haven't seen each other for a while. And I just wanted to ask both of you, what have you been up to lately?

00:03:14: Eliane Gerber Well, I'm doing some design work at home, so to speak. I'm currently, like, re-arranging furniture. I bought some new furniture. And like, I'm doing a lot of hands-on work. I had a little vacation and at the same time money and time. So if that coincides, that's a good moment to do something like that. Paola, what have you been up to lately?

00:03:45: Paola Pierri I had two wonderful weeks of holidays, where I've been in Greece, which is a special place to me, and that was end of august. And then I'm back to a full, full diary, writing a project proposal, but also working with the other members of the IDR-Leitungs-Team, the Institute of Design Research-Leitungs-Team. So we lead the team together with six people. And there's a lot of work that we're doing at the moment, thinking and strategizing for the next few months and years.

00:04:15: Eliane Gerber And Arno, what about you? I read a lot of emails that your project is going on quite a lot. There's a lot going on there.

00:04:24: Arno Görgen We are doing a lot of stuff right now. Next week, we have a little street event in the Kornhausplatz in Bern, for example. But lately, I've done, amongst other things, I've been writing an article on temporality in this epidemic s imulator game, Plague Inc, for example, reading a lot of stuff about acceleration, about the sociology of time and the politics of time and all these things in the context of game design on the one hand and on the other hand on epidemiology and these things. And it's super interesting. And I have already done this about eight years ago, and a lot of stuff has happened in research since then. And yeah, it's a lot of fun. And this month, I will have a publication ready on the game Fallout. Maybe you know the franchise. And we have an anthology together with Rudolf Inders. And we are super happy because the SNF financed it for open access and it's a really beautiful thing and I'm looking forward to the publication.

00:05:44: Eliane Gerber That sounds really intriguing, especially the part about temporality in games. It's really something that I'm really interested as a player. I really love games that play around or change your experience of time. That sounds really intriguing.

00:06:00: Arno Görgen It is.

00:06:02: Paola Pierri Interesting topic.

00:06:04: Eliane Gerber I look forward to read your text on that.

00:06:08: Arno Görgen Me too.

00:06:10: Eliane Gerber Paola, I've just introduced you and your areas of expertise. What would you say is your connection to design ethics? How did you get interested in the topic?

00:06:22: Paola Pierri I think, Eliane, it's not an easy question because in a way, I feel like since I've started practising design and working with design methods in different contexts, I always had ethics in the back of my mind. And maybe this is actually quite normal in the field where I've been operating. But maybe one anecdote for when I actually encountered ethics in inverted commas the first time, which is the formal ethic, as I would describe it. That was the time when I was doing my PhD research at the University of the Arts in London. And because my research involved participants, I had to go through a series of forms and respond to a series of questions to make sure that I was doing my research ethically. Now, I think this formal ethics, these ethical guidelines that many universities develop in, especially for those doing research and research with participants, are really, really important. And it was really helpful for me to go through the questions that they were asking, challenging my assumptions, or just having to explain what was obviously ethical for me, but I had to make it clear for those who were examining my forms, and they needed to accept it in order for me to continue my research. So that was perhaps my very first encounter with formal ethics, which taught me a lot about how it works.

00:07:46: Eliane Gerber Can you give some examples of these kinds of questions that you had to answer in this context?

00:07:51: Paola Pierri I mean, they were asking me why I wanted to interview people, why I needed to engage with people, what I was benefiting from this contact, and in my case was, of course, different workshops and activities as well as interviews, not just interviews. What I was benefiting, what participants were getting back, what was their added value in participating, what was in there for them, Which I thought was a really interesting question that I was not, perhaps, I wasn't very clear myself, what was the value for them. But also they were asking me questions about risks. And this is, I think, where it got interesting, because At the time, my research was on the concept of resilience at community level, but I was working in the field of mental health. I was working with the collaboration of a mental health organization. And when I mentioned mental health, that immediately triggered an alarm bell in the Ethical Committee, so they didn't approve my ethical forms. And this was because just the moment they read about mental health, they thought, this was going to be research done with vulnerable people. Again, in inverted commas. That meant for them that I needed to do more ethical forms, I needed to prove them that I was not going to harm these people who were vulnerable. What was interesting for me is that at this point, I realized that they wanted to, of course, protect myself and very much protected also the University. But there was a big assumption made when they read just the words mental health about the fact that I was going to work with people that were vulnerable and that I needed, therefore, to protect them. There was also a big assumption that this was going to be somehow more like a medical project in the health field, although it wasn't. And I realised that one thing which is really important is this formal ethics and the forms that you have to fill in when you do research. And this is a really important because they ask important questions to researchers. But then there is the substantial, the real ethical questions that you encounter when you do your project. In the university example, I did my ethical forms at the very beginning. So, second time I submitted, they approved it, so I could start doing my research. But during my project, I had a lot of ethical questions that emerged, and there was nobody there. From the ethical committees, nobody from the university could help me. So this is a very traditional understanding of ethics, which is done at the beginning of the research projects, but a lot of questions happen during the projects. And this is what I actually, I was lucky enough to work with this organisation who had a lot of expertise regarding safeguarding, protection of people, ethical practices. So I learned a lot from them and from these kind of very informal conversations that we were having. Every time, I had a doubt about big things or very small things. And this was really helpful and unfortunately, it wasn't there in the formal ethics from the university, which is really a pity. Ethics should be a process. It's not one thing you do at the beginning. And it should be more than formal. It should be very substantial.

00:11:20: Arno Görgen You've been talking about three different things, at least as I understand it. One is medical ethics or bioethics. The other one is research ethics, and the third part is a design ethic approach. And how would you differentiate those three for what you are doing, at least?

00:11:44: Paola Pierri So the medical ethics is absolutely important, but it's most time very much in this formal sphere that I'm describing. So it's about doing a series of protocols and doing a series of check that you're doing getting things right. And it's mostly happening when, of course, we're working with patients in the healthcare settings, their life at risk. We're talking about that level of risk for patients, which wasn't absolutely the case of my project. I was working in community mental health. I was working with issues of resilience and community level. I wasn't working with individual people who were not well, who were ill. So this was completely not appropriate in my case. I think the research one and the design one are actually connected. Research through design and designers who do research, they need to go through ethical questions and they need to go through ethical clearance when they do their research. And this could be done, as I said, very formally, like in my university example, but this could also be more substantial and done through the practice, considering Ethic as a Practice. And this is what I like of the third component, as you're calling it, Arno, that is this idea of the design ethics, instead of just talking about ethics in design. What I like is that such approach of design ethics really implies that ethical considerations are not separate to design questions. So there's not design here and ethics here, but actually the ethical questions are very much part of the design questions that we face in our process.

00:13:35: Eliane Gerber Maybe this is a good time to again make a step back and consider the question, what is ethics or what does this word mean? And also what is not ethics. Maybe you can define it for us, how we use it in this discussion, and also for the rest of this season. And then you already made this connection to design ethics, but also we can ask what's not design ethics then.

00:14:07: Paola Pierri I think, I mean, ethics is usually understood as normative ethics, which involves the theory of, I mean, very simply said, of what is right or what is good. And it's a set of behaviors or behavioral standards that help us deciding, when we act in specific circumstances, how we should do it, how we should act in order to be right and to be good. Usually, when it comes to the relationship with ethics and design, this is very much an applied ethics. What we talk about in design is very much a form of applied ethics. I think it's also been defined performative ethics. It's ethics that we perform through our practice. And this is the application of these normative theories to the design practice. And it's basically a series of theories that can help us deciding how do we take decisions in practice, in our work, in our design work every day, on issues like our agency as designers or the relationship that we have as designers with technology, the technology that we design or the environment based on the resources that we're using or society, of course, is really difficult to define as a field. I think, is a quite... I might actually try not to define what is design ethics because it's actually really a broad and nuanced field. And there's different ways in which different designers understand and do design ethics. What I always think is, like design is a big thing in itself. Think about the difference between product designers versus fashion designers and versus social designers. The things that they face, the ethical questions that they face are, of course, very different because their practice is so different. And ethics is also understood quite broadly. It's not one thing everywhere. Ethics is very contextual. And again, depending on the design field in which we base it, in which we apply it, then Design Ethics becomes a different thing.

00:16:23: Eliane Gerber When I was in school, I had this ethics course, right? And there, Something we talked a lot about was the difference between ethics and morals or norms and stuff. Something that I think often happens when we discuss about design ethics is that we talk about what is ethical design? What makes design good or ethically desirable or morally desirable. But we often use like, morals and ethics interchangeably in in many ways. I feel like that's often the discussion, if we have discussions about design ethics. And I think it's quite important to make this distinction also that you mentioned. And I don't know, maybe it's to simplify, but to understand ethics more as a process to figure out how or to think about, or maybe also what you I mentioned with the forms you had to fill out, right? That there are ethical tasks that concern design as well or a design practice that leads to ethical tasks that then ethics provide, ethics as a discipline, as part of philosophy, right? It gives instruments to handle these questions.

00:17:59: Paola Pierri And I think, again, we're talking... It is such a huge topic, and it's, of course, very complex, but trying to simplify, again, in a way, ethics is this normative definition of what we think is right and wrong. And then we can have a huge discussion about what is we. Because, of course, ethics is contextual. This is an important point that I wanted to make. And what is ethical in certain contexts? I'm talking about groups within the same country, but of course, I'm talking about different geographies and different places or different countries or people from different religions. What is good and what is bad. What is considered to be ethical then changes and it depends on the context. It's heavily depending on the context. This is ethics as in the normative understanding that we got from philosophy. And moral is, as I understand it, most of the time the applying or the behaving according to these ethical norms. So this is a little bit my understanding of the two parts, the ethical parts and the moral parts. And what I think is really interesting of design ethics, that we're trying to think about ethics in a performative way and in a practical way, in an applied way. And I agree very much with you Eliane, that is a conversation, is not a checklist, is not a to-do list, but is of do and don't. No? It's not that. I think I like to think about ethical, design ethics in design, more like as a framework that we might have to negotiate every time we enter in a new project with the people we work with. So it's not a framework that might apply everywhere or in every field of design or in every context in which we design. But it would be actually really important to have these ethical conversations, as I call them sometimes, with the people we're working with, like in my case with the mental health organisations. I went back to them to raise my ethical questions, and I resolved them somehow. I tried to address them through conversations, through dialogue.

00:20:12: Arno Görgen I totally agree with you. I would like to add that it's also extremely complex because the context of the design practice is always divided into many, many fields like: who are the actors? What are the goals of the design? What is the actual practice of design to reach those goals? And so on, and so on. So this is also why we started to think about this topic, because it's an underlying topic in everything we do at the institute. But it's not so often that we really use these terms like ethics for these things we are doing.

00:21:01: Paola Pierri And I think, if I can add a couple of things. One is that I would really love to see the point of ethics being actually perceived as pertinent and applied to everybody who does design research. Because I work in social design, a lot of the time the question comes to me, or people look at me in ethical conversations, but I think it's a point and it's a question that designers in all fields of practice should absolutely feel as their own question. So it does apply to everyone. And I want to maybe also challenge a little bit, maybe two stereotypes, actually, that happens a lot in ethics. The first one is that we don't talk about it because it feels like it might be something boring or might be something too technical, the forms that I was talking about at the beginning. Or also because we think it might actually hinder innovation, it might stop creativity, it might be something on the way. This is absolutely the wrong way of thinking about ethics. And the second this is also that sometimes we're going in the opposite direction and we think that Design Ethics is something about how good we are as designers and how design can have this hero role. And I think that is also wrong. Because ethics different disciplines have their own ethics, and we don't think about these disciplines being heroic. We work in collaboration with many others. We don't do it on our own, which is also adding to the question of the complexities of talking about design ethics, because in many design projects, we are not working alone as designers, but we work with other people, and we work with other professional or disciplinary backgrounds. That adds to the complexity of talking about design ethics in our field, I think.

00:22:52: Eliane Gerber Now, having a better understanding of the term, right? I would like to switch to focus a bit more on the field as a discipline, so the design ethics as a discipline. And the question to you on this, from your point of view, engaging with design ethics as a discipline, what are key questions, positions, and maybe also persons in the study of design ethics.

00:23:18: Paola Pierri I think design ethics or ethics in design, in this case, maybe, has learned a lot, of course, from philosophy. I'm thinking about a book of philosophy in I don't remember the exact title from Glenn Parsons, who has wrote about what can design learn from philosophy in different areas. And of course, he has a whole chapter on ethics. I'm also thinking, because of my background, of course, because of what I studied in design anthropology, that anthropology can also be a discipline or an interesting field to look at when we look at questions of ethics in design. And I'm thinking about the work of among others, Keith Murphy, who is an anthropologist and did an interesting study of design in Sweden. And what it shows us really beautifully is that design is, what I was saying before about ethics, is contextual. That what is good design in Sweden depends on the value that Swedish society shares at a certain point in time. So what we understand as the Swedish design and what we understand as the good Swedish design, very much depends on the important, what is considered to be important by Swedish society from the '70s and onwards, perhaps. So this is really like another important point, I think, that points in the direction of design being happening in different contexts in different way, as well as, of course, ethics being contextual, being the importance of cultural and contextual factors. I also want to mention, when it comes to important figures and important questions, that we need address in the field of designers, design practitioners, and researchers, and educators, of course, is the work of Sasha Costanza-Schock, and their work with a collective of people, actually, who have been looking at the notion of design justice. And I think we learn a lot from their work about how it is not always and simply about designing the same thing that can be used by everybody, but how actually we make through our design choice intentional decisions that might exclude certain people and by benefit other people. And if we understand and if we take a design justice approach when we work as designers, so almost expanding this idea of ethics, it's not just good design, it's more than good design. It's design that aims to address the root causes of injustice in society. And I think this is another interesting field and another interesting Question that we should be looking into.

00:26:03: Eliane Gerber You, Paola, mentioned, especially two questions, this question about the contextuality or also the relativity in a way of design and the question of what is good design or what is design supposed to do or how to evaluate design. And the other aspect of how we make intentional decisions or like this, or like the, let's say the political dimension, the question of justice in designing, which as a designer, I know it just goes in many ways through every project that I do, right? And you can be more or less aware of it or prioritize these questions more or less. So the question that results for me out of that is: What are good ways to deal with these questions? And also, how do we find the right questions to ask?

00:27:08: Paola Pierri I mean, it is not an easy answer because it is a difficult question. I think what we have seen in design, which has been, I think, for me, really interesting, is a bit of an evolution. Some people talk about an ethical turn. I don't know if I like this term. We have had so many in different disciplines. But it's this idea that in the past, design was really looking outside of the discipline to learn about ethics. What can we ask? What can philosophy tell us? What can Anthropology tell us? What can Humanities tell us. And I think this is important. I was making this point myself. We can learn a lot from Anthropology, we can learn from philosophy. But I think it's maybe 20 years, if not more, that we have moved to really think about ethical questions from within the discipline. What is specific of design ethics, for instance? What can design bring to the ethical debates? And there is a really interesting field, there's a really interesting area of of what is called the Material Ethics, which is, for instance, looking at what can we develop from within design, from within our own discipline, that will bring new questions to ethics. So it's not ethics that brings new questions to design, but it's design that brings new questions to ethics. And I thought, I think this process is really interesting because what is, again, very simply described, but what is this point of material ethics, is this idea that we traditionally understand ethics as a thing that goes human to human. It's developed between humans. But actually, if we start introducing design and if we start asking design questions to ethics, then we start asking the questions of: „what is the role of the objects, the artefacts, the things that we make in the ethical conversations. And there's a lot of interesting work, starting from Bruno Latour to actually many, many others who are thinking about what values and what ethical principles are we embedding in the objects that we make, but also how these objects do ethical work themselves. Und I may be given an example, which is a simple and classical one, to show what does that mean in practice, which is this speed bump, the thing you have on the road that make you slow down, Now, this is a good behavior that you're trying to pursue. And you can do it in many different ways. Of course, you can do it with human conversations or relationship. You can do it through communication, education, campaigning. But there is another way of also pushing towards more ethical behaviors that is having this bump thing on the road so that the car cannot go too fast. So the object itself is actually doing some of the ethic work for us. And we can debate for long whether this is completely good, what happens, are we nudging people in a certain directions, is there still a human intention, of course, at the back, that decides and designs these objects in certain ways, and what is the role of designers to decide or choose what ethical values and principles to embed in an artifact. But I think this is an interesting part of design ethics that is very much coming from design versus ethics and not the other way around. And I think it's an interesting journey.

00:30:53: Arno Görgen Would you say that this materialist turn in ethics, well, I would call it that, I don't know if that's an actual term, but this materialist direction in ethics is something that's really the specific thing about design ethics, that the outcome of design practices more or less indirect in the sense that the designer in the end maybe doesn't have the direct interaction with people, the humans, but the object they design is doing this part of the interaction.

00:31:37: Paola Pierri I think what I just want to say is that we have, if we start looking at ethical questions from within design, originally, so we don't just look at the philosophy, Anthropology, Humanities, or other disciplines, but we develop an ethical sensibility from within design, then I think if you start doing that, and I think many designers, scholars, and practitioners are doing that already, then the artifacts and what we make, because of course is a very practical, practice-based discipline, what we make also become an interesting actor in the question of ethics. And some of the ethical work that the designer do is with a person, of course, is with other people, but is also through the artifacts that they make.

00:32:26: Arno Görgen One question that comes up in this context is, maybe it's too specific, but I was just thinking about, does this ethicalization of the object maybe also lead to a diffusion of responsibility on the side of the designers? Like, we are only doing the design and what happens after that doesn't concern us. Is this a real danger?

00:32:52: Paola Pierri I think this is a real danger. I think that, I mean, two things I want to make clear, I hope it is clear already, that of course this understanding of material ethics for me doesn't really stop the question of there's a human decision to make certain objects in one direction or in another, and actually raises perhaps other questions about, is it okay or is it good enough that I am nudging you through my objects instead as through a human to human discussion? In conversation. So there are a lot of... It's controversial, I would say, but it's absolutely like... It's one trend, but it's, I think, a controversial thing. I still believe the human component is there. And the responsibility is with the designer in terms of what they decide to do, of course, and what they decide to produce, but also about the effect that this thing have after the design process has ended.

00:34:00: Eliane Gerber This question of responsibility that is at the designer, I think it's still also important not to make it absolute, right? Because there's also responsibility in with the user, right? Because I think that when we discuss design, and especially in this context of design and justice or design for changing the world in a positive way. I feel like often this design is pictured in a way, as we mentioned before, this heroic design or the idea that you can with one object or just with design, you can solve every problem, right? So I think this also finding out where the responsibility lies and how much responsibility and ability to act actually is, is part of ethical considerations, right?

00:35:03: Paola Pierri The question with design, I think we have, I've seen, at least in also in my work in many years, maybe two different problems that go in opposite direction. So there is on one side, sometimes the tendency to say we're just designers. And of course, we are embedded in a complex socioeconomic and political context that we need to take into consideration. Many times, designers operate under a brief, or they have to work, of course, especially those who practice design, not the researchers, perhaps in academia, but they have to work to achieve a certain outcome that has been given by a company or by an external client or the company where they work. So of course, there are limitations on one side. And I think sometimes there is this tendency to see design as to undermine what design can really do. And I believe, at least I learned that from Papanek, from the 70s, and of course, the whole movement towards a more socially responsible design practice, I learned that designers have more control than what they believe. There is a lot that can be done by design and through design. And I think this is maybe one side of the coin. There is, of course, the other side, which is something very unique to design work, which is what I was describing before. Design is very powerful and has a lot of responsibilities. Of course, we share these responsibilities because most time we work collaboratively. We share these responsibilities with others around us. They might be coming from other disciplines, they might be bringing different values, and they might be understanding also the question of ethics in a different way. And I guess what we need to develop perhaps more is this capacity of, first of all, not be afraid of questions of ethics or not finding it either boring or too complex, but actually really engage in what I called before this ethical conversation. So really ask questions about what we see might be problematic in our work. And those questions can go in very different directions, depending on our profession. But I'm sure, and I hope, designers do ask more questions regarding, just one simple example, resources that are needed for any product or any digital products that we actually build. I hope these questions are raised and discussed in the teams where designers are embedded.

00:37:41: Eliane Gerber Yeah, this hope for inclusion of design ethics really brings me to your question: How do we really bring that into practice, both in the design practice and in design research practice? How can we include it, if we haven't included it yet? And how can we improve it, if we're at the beginning or even further in our journey of taking these questions seriously or even finding these questions? Do you have specific, I don't know, tips or guides that you can give us and our listeners about how to How to do this?

00:38:32: Paola Pierri I'm afraid I wouldn't give you a specific answer to this one because I don't... I would like to avoid perhaps this idea that we could have a checklist or we could have a list of questions when it comes to ethics. And this is an approach that is, as I said, it was the example of the university I gave at the very beginning. The risk of those approaches is they really understand ethics in a very fixed way. They miss the point of how ethics is contextual, and they miss the point of really approaching the ethical questions in a reflective way during the process, beginning of a project, and then we might be okay with our ethical work, and we might go on thinking about ethics anymore. I think I want to really bring the message that for me, ethics is really this process that happens at different points in times during a project. What happens to the object or the system or the service that we have designed after we have designed it? What happens to the community we've been working with after we leave the field with our design intervention? So I think really this idea of ethics not as a one moment in time at the beginning of the project or midterm, but as a process thing. And of course, what might be more helpful is to take more like a framework approach, where we actually identify different questions that might be relevant. But we create this framework with our communities, the communities we work with every time that we work with them. So it is very context-specific. And this, I think, of course, is not giving you the answer of the list or giving you the answer of the guidelines, but it's really giving an answer that I think understand ethics more like substancial. I want to mention one more thing that I think is always a good practice, and I think it's also a useful principle, and there's a lot of practical suggestions in their book from Sasha Constanza-Schock on Design Justice. But one practical example is to avoid to take ethical decisions on your own. As one person on a project, as one designer in a project, I think you really want to do this in conversation, in dialogue with others, and you really want to ensure that you actually do it with as much as possible, including diversity of perspectives and diversity of opinions. Because if you ask a room of designers or people with a similar background and similar identities, what do they think about what is good or what is just? They might answer you with a lot of biases and a lot of assumptions that are embedded in the group. So to avoid group thinking, I guess the best thing to do for ethical conversations is to have them with as much diverse group as possible.

00:41:32: Arno Görgen I might add that I think it's quite important that we do more ethics in education. And I think in one of our next episodes, we'll also have a scholar Christian Bauer, from Germany in our show. And we will talk with him about how he teaches design ethics. And I think this is actually super important to increase the sensitivisation, concerning ethical topics in design and to just talk about it and get these things into the brains of our students, to just have them heard one time. So because it's very important to know that these problems exist, to be able to identify those problems in the in the own process, when we are practicing design ourselves in the end.

00:42:34: Paola Pierri Absolutely, Arno. If I can add, I think it's super important. I also think, and I'm going to listen to your podcast with a lot of, with big attention, because it's actually really something not easy to do. Especially if we are thinking about this understanding of ethics that I'm trying to bring forward, which is so contextual and doesn't give you a lot of answers, but actually asks more questions. And I know that sometimes students want the certainty of what are the questions, what are the domains, what are the things I need to address? And you want to give them some, of course, some boundaries or some hints. But I think it's navigating this uncertainty. That is something that, of course, would be very difficult for students, but it's so important that they do that. And I also believe, again, it's something where repeating the questions or addressing ethics through different classes, not just maybe in one class about ethics, but addressing it through their project, through the different activities they do when they learn about research or when they learn about doing something in a workshop, something very practical, this would be the best way of learning ethics in an applied approach and really through examples and practical examples.

00:43:55: Eliane Gerber What I very much take away from our conversation today is that the key capacity really is to identify ethical problems in order to be able to reflect on it, to get a position on it and make ethically reflected decisions and act out of them. So for me, that's really a key insight of this conversation today. So Paola, thank you very much for being here and for sharing your experience, your knowledge, and your thoughts on this topic. I very much appreciate the conversation we had.

00:44:43: Paola Pierri I love the conversation. I think it's a really complex one and a huge one, but I'm really looking forward to the whole series because I know you're going to go through addressing ethics in context, in different fields, in different areas, which is the best way of talking about it.

00:44:59: Eliane Gerber Yes, and we will talk to you again or towards the end of this season, so we can look at those different areas that we touched upon together again and discuss or also catch up with our conversation there.

00:45:21: Arno Görgen So now I'll switch to German again for the last concluding words. Also ihr Lieben, ich hoffe, ihr fandet es genauso spannend wie ich. Designethik ist einfach ein unglaublich spannendes Thema, einfach auch, weil es in diesen Kontexten so weit in unsere Gesellschaft, in unser Leben hineinreicht und nicht nur eben an den Tischen der Designer aufhört, sondern ein Leben weit darüber hinaus führt. Und alle wichtigen Quellen, die wir genannt haben, findet ihr auch in den Show Notes. Wenn euch irgendwelche designethischen Fragen beschäftigen, lasst es uns gerne wissen. Ihr erreicht uns via Podigee oder LinkedIn und auch unsere Kontaktinformationen findet ihr in den Show Notes. Ihr Lieben, vielen Dank für euer Interesse, für euer Zuhören, wenn euch dieser Podcast gefallen hat, empfehlt ihn gerne weiter und lasst uns vielleicht auch ein Sternchen oder zwei in den Bewertungen da. Wir freuen uns über jedes Feedback, das wir kriegen können. Macht’s gut und habt eine gute Zeit. Tschüss. Tschüss.