Engaging with ethics in the HCI design process: A study of ethical design practice in different work contexts

As technology increasingly permeates daily life, HCI designers must move beyond acknowledging the ethical impacts of the outcomes of their designs to engaging with ethics throughout the design process. While previous research has explored theoretical perspectives and corporate practices, less is known about how ethics is understood and enacted across different professional contexts. This paper investigates how 12 HCI designers from academia, corporate, and applied research settings understand and engage with ethics in their work. Through qualitative interviews, we examined designers’ perspectives on ethics and ethics in the design process, the challenges they face, and the strategies they apply in practice. We found that designers across contexts struggle to define ethics and feel unprepared to address it. They discuss ethics in relation to design practice, and despite shared concerns, our findings show differences among work contexts. Participants are a central concern, with non-corporate designers adopting more formal approaches and deeper participant engagement. Corporate designers take more practical approaches, aligning ethics with company goals. Interviewees described strategies to address ethical challenges, offering insights into how ethics is applied in practice, where applied research designers reflect elements of both academic and corporate settings, combining strategies from each. Our findings also highlight a mismatch between formal ethical approval processes and the evolving nature of design work, where they fall short of supporting ongoing ethical reflection. Our findings offer insight into ethics in diverse HCI contexts and inform future approaches to ethics in HCI design, where we argue for more flexible, work context-specific approaches.