Co-Lead by: Malé Luján Escalante and Ella Britton, UAL:LCC Design School
A UAL collaboration between LCC: MA Service Design and LCC: MA Design for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures in partnership with Inner Development Goals Network, London Community and Kiranjot, consulting on spiritual and embodiment dimensions. Inspired by Utopia as Method, this brief invites Masters students to form collaborations with more-than-human systems and co-create tangible new design tools that:
1) Challenge design-thinking conventions.
2) Enhance/Mobilise/Activate IDG framework with an emphasis on nature engagement, spiritual connection and pluriversal—rather than universal—approaches.
These are tools that invite the spiritual, political, pleasurable, embodied, and material futures. These will be useful and convivial tools to support the changemaker’s inner work in the context of degrowth and will be tested and exhibited within the IDGN community (and beyond!)
Practice is informed by the following bodies of work:
Utopia as Method
Prefigurative Futures
Pluriversal Approach: thinking-feeling with the bodies
Co-Lead by: Malé Luján Escalante, UAL:LCC Design School and Christine Mortimer, Management School, Lancaster University
At the core of IsITethical? there is a passion for the design methods that hold spaces for proactive discussions and circumspect reflections, sustaining collaboration of people and actors that may have competing interests and radically different worldviews.
We explored Ethics through Design Principles with postgraduate students for them to create their own co-design methods in different contexts and domains.
Following this pedagogical dimension of our work, we showcase projects of engaged research with students via knowledge exchange activities in collaboration across countries, disciplines, institutions and sectors. Beyond collaborative challenges, these projects brought stories of impact to sustain research collaborations, for the students career progressions, and for participants, including public engagements and community building.
One challenge in designing AI comes from the work needed to align the wants of the users, the needs of society, the abilities of the tools, and the content of data themselves. These disconnects are often unspoken, yet regularly lead to unintended ethical impacts.
For example, when designing AI intended to be used in decisions to help people the most, what happens if the AI looks for how to help the most people, but the user wants to know who needs help the most? This workshop starts from these disconnects, using uncertainty as a conceptual framing tool to explore how creative, hands-on, and participatory methods can help us see how ethical challenges like social injustices, uneven benefits, or unexpected responsibilities relate to the design and use of AI.
Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the (informational) right to the city, I explore what we can do to make data commons and what action such data commons could allow. I ask how this could help build response-ability in a world in climate and related permacrisis, tracing forms of resistance, opportunities for design, and grassroots efforts.
Monika Büscher is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University and co-director of isITethical? Exchange. She co-edits the book series Changing Mobilities. Monika currently leads research on decarbonising transport, disaster mobilities and ethical, legal and social issues of IT innovation in a range of different projects.
In this lecture, Dr. Luke Moffat (Sociology Department, Trustworthy Autonomous Systems – Security Hub, Lancaster University) explores the cultural, material, and political entanglements of artificial intelligence. Drawing on semiotics, philosophy, and indigenous knowledge systems, the talk critiques the “Westernizing Dream” of AI — a vision tied to extractivist practices, colonial logics, and securitization. Dr. Moffat invites us to reimagine AI not as a neutral tool, but as a system deeply embedded in power structures and planetary consequences — and to consider alternative ways of being, knowing, and designing.
This lecture is part of the Design Brief Award and Companion Program of Public Lectures and Creative Workshops, hosted by isITethical in collaboration with the Design School at London College of Communication, UAL, exploring the role of arts and design in AI ethics and responsible innovation.
Ethics through Design (EtD) uses co-design methods to create, facilitate and nurture anticipatory capabilities for research and innovation, responsive to both society and environment. In practice, EtD problematizes both ethics and design. This lecture draws upon ethics of technology to formulate principles of co-design facilitation. EtD understands ethics, beyond regulation and administrative ticking-box exercises, as contextual, creative, and participatory ongoing processes.
EtD has been developed at IsITethical? Exchange originally within Disaster and Risk Management (DRM) and Emergency Response domains, over 7 years of working in partnership with emergency response services, policymakers, academics across disciplines, standardisation organisations, and key IT developer companies and its framework is now being adopted and applied in other sectors including AI for education and AI Responsible Research Innovation. In the lecture, we share the framework we have used to design and facilitate ethical co-design workshops, tools and interventions, posited as response-able pedagogy.
Prof. Alexander Boden and Veronika Krauß, University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg.
This lecture by Prof. Alexander Boden and Veronika Krauß from the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg explores consumer protection in digital technologies, focusing on dark patterns and their growing presence in emerging areas like XR (Extended Reality). Drawing on research in consumer informatics and interface design, the talk considers how manipulative design practices challenge ethics and user agency in increasingly immersive tech environments.
Presented as part of the Design Brief Award and Companion Program of Public Lectures and Creative Workshops, hosted by isITethical in collaboration with the Design School at London College of Communication, UAL, the series explores the role of arts and design in AI ethics and responsible research and innovation.
In collaboration with UAL:LCC Design School, Trilateral, University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, and King’s College London Gallery of Science
In collaboration with the Design School at London College of Communications, UAL , isITethical hosted a series Design Brief Award and a Companion Program of Public Lectures and Creative Workshops Exploring the role of Arts and Design in AI ethics and AI Responsible Research Innovation.
Context
AI technologies and visions of AI promise great societal and even environmental solutions, from data management and predictive analysis, to medicine and means of production, from entertainment to modes of living in this world and out of it. AI visions are populating an image of a future in which human-made agencies are solving the wicked, human made, highly complex crises of today.
However, current AI innovations across domains involve intrusions of privacy, surveillance of people, assets, and undiscriminating exploitation of human and natural resources and environments, as well as maximizing a sense of distributed, even diluted, responsibility. Ethical issues arise from gender, political and racial biases, to discrimination and profiling, from hidden exploitative labour to hidden environmental destruction.
There is a big “ethical turn” in tech innovation. The media is following cases related to social networks, autonomous systems, facial recognition, bio cams and sensors, health apps, track and trace, and algorithmic political manipulation. Responsible Research and Innovation and Ethical Frameworks for AI have many disciplines busy, from Computer Sciences to Social Sciences, there are international digital lawyers and human rights activists, philosophers and anthropologists, policy makers and tech CEO’s struggling to address AI ethical tensions proactively.
Ethics are hard to understand, ethical conversations are complex and slow to engage with, ethical frameworks are perceived as obstacles to innovation, tick-box administrative paperwork, a challenge to bypass.
The collaborative unit brief invites thinking about how designerly and creative methods can be applied to an ethics that is accessible, cares about context, that is participatory and creative. Arts & Design has had a huge role in imagining, designing, and developing AI technologies. This brief is not about the technical solutions, it is about the role of Arts & Design in supporting human and more-than-human centered, ethical and responsible innovation of AI.
“Hello, AI Robot” is a collaborative reading tool that invites children and parents to learn and explore together the basic principles of artificial intelligence and machine learning through interactive activities and puzzles.
Beyond just the technical aspects of AI and robotics, “Hello, AI Robot” also addresses important ethical issues. The book prompts discussions around transparency of AI-related principles, trust toward AI robots and autonomy of using AI and robotics, encouraging children to think critically about the impact of technology on their daily lives.
The Emotion Matrix, project details…
The Emotion Matrix project is an immersive exhibition showcasing the possible future in 2050, where AI brain chip implant technology has been widely adopted. The exhibition is centered around the product of Emo+ Chip, which could be implanted into people’s brain to make emotion adjustment. We explore the possibilities this technology could bring to the future and the ethical issues that could arise around its development.
Monday Mornings, project details…
Monday Morning is a board game which aims to get everyone to experience the ethical dilemmas around the introduction of AI to the workplace. The players explore a future office, and are confronted with ethical dilemmas triggered by current benign, malevolent or misinformed application of digital technology. In its second phase, the game introduces scenarios inspired by speculations of future technologies.
The mechanics of the game are inspired by the award- winning horror board game “Betrayal at the House on the Hill”, while the player choices and future scenarios are inspired by Deceptive Design framework, EU Responsible AI framework, and sci-fi films, books and video games.
FACEIT, project details…
FACEIT focuses on the ethics in Al diagnosis of facial skin diseases. It’s for the patients engaged in peer support groups held by the British Association of Dermatologists (BAD), to open up conversations of concerns about ethical issues in Al diagnosis in a creative and engaging way, as well as providing emotional support.
This acts as a scaffolding to help patients primarily and also their family, friends and carers to form and articulate their unique understanding, concerns and expectancy about data processing in Al diagnosis.
Dr Meirina Triharini (ITB:DeLab), Dr Chris Mortimer (Lancaster University) and Dr Malé Luján Escalante (LCC:UAL)
Dr Meirina Triharini (ITB:DeLab), Dr Chris Mortimer (Lancaster University) and Dr Malé Luján Escalante are co-chairing a track entitled “Approaching Displacement with Creative and Designerly Methods” in which many of the projects from students across the institutions will be presenting their work in the context of the 20th International Association for the Study of Forced Migration Conference (IASFM20) – Forced Displacement in an Urbanizing World Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 21-23 January 2025.
The co-chairs use the opportunity of brought together a cross-disciplinary network of scholars in their own institutions across their countries, to invite them to the conference and catalyse futures collaborations. The proceedings of the track will be published as part of special edition of the same name with Global Discourse (Bristol University Press) in 2026.
I am always passionate about designing for and with vulnerable or marginalized groups. I am grateful for the opportunity with the Transition Living Lab to co-create a training program for the displaced people. It has been an inspiring journey for me to explore how service design approaches complex social needs through the Systemic Design Framework. Designing with care for vulnerable groups with appropriate topic, language and materials has been an invaluable reflection on the role of service design, and its strengths and limitations.
This experience has fueled me to embark on my final major project with the Ealing Council addressing the challenges faced by rough sleepers with No Recourse Public Funds around Havelock Estate in Southall. The project aims to explore upskilling through volunteering opportunities for rough sleepers so that they can work on their personal development and mitigate the challenges they are facing. The service idea is going to be tested with Hope for Southall Street Homeless and the Bixley Community Garden Southall. I anticipate the idea can be transferred to newly accommodated individuals or people with addiction who need support in establishing healthy routine. A handbook on how service designers can approach complex social needs will also be delivered.
