Ethics Pathways: A Design Activity for Reflecting on Ethics Engagement in HCI Research

TL;DR

Ethics Pathways addresses the problem of understanding how HCI and design researchers engage with ethics during their research, moving beyond formal ethics reviews to surface the lived, situated practices that constitute ethics engagement. The authors develop a design activity that guides participants through recalling incidents, designing stakeholder characters, mapping path-based actions, and reflecting on emotions, using iterative playtesting to refine the method. The contributions include the Ethics Pathways activity itself and a conceptual framing of ethics engagement as ongoing flows shaped by affective experience, social power, and institutional goals, enabling analyses of practice and informing potential interventions. The approach offers a practical, resource-efficient probe for education, industry, and research contexts to promote responsible and reflective ethics in in-situ research practice.

Abstract

This paper introduces Ethics Pathways, a design activity aimed at understanding HCI and design researchers' ethics engagements and flows during their research process. Despite a strong ethical commitment in these fields, challenges persist in grasping the complexity of researchers' engagement with ethics -- practices conducted to operationalize ethics -- in situated institutional contexts. Ethics Pathways, developed through six playtesting sessions, offers a design approach to understanding the complexities of researchers' past ethics engagements in their work. This activity involves four main tasks: recalling ethical incidents; describing stakeholders involved in the situation; recounting their actions or speculative alternatives; and reflection and emotion walk-through. The paper reflects on the role of design decisions and facilitation strategies in achieving these goals. The design activity contributes to the discourse on ethical HCI research by conceptualizing ethics engagement as a part of ongoing research processing, highlighting connections between individual affective experiences, social interactions across power differences, and institutional goals.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: The final kit of materials for Ethics Pathways: A - new path card sets including a diverse set of paths in various shapes. The light and dark versions allow participants to distinguish between actual experiences and speculations about alternative paths that could have occurred; B - characters and stakeholders are now represented by using colorful pawn game pieces; C - providing sticky notes for participants to annotate their paths to describe incidents and endings.
• Figure 2: We provide the intersection path card with a blank sticky note to describe the incident at the beginning of the main activity. We inform them to write down the initial moments of the story they bring up during the activity.
• Figure 3: Example of incident card created by P2 in step 3
• Figure 4: Left: P6 moving character pawns while explaining her story; Right: examples of characters designed by P6 representing stakeholders, including an adjunct professor, local gardener, developers, assistant professor, associate professor, and a local education center.
• Figure 5: P5 designing her paths and adding action notes in Step 4