Applied Ethics as Reflection, Interrogation and Design: Insights from Instructional Design Cases

In contrast to normative ethics, which emphasizes determining whether a person or action is good or bad and developing codes to govern individual behaviors, applied ethics focuses on the application of ethics to real-world problems and contexts of practice (Ethics Unwrapped, n.d.). In design-oriented disciplines such as instructional design and technology (IDT), that application happens in and through the profession’s design and decision-making processes and methods. Although scholarship on applied ethics is extensive in medicine, business, engineering, nursing, and other professions, it is under-developed in IDT. In this study, we conducted an analysis of design cases and conceptual papers that explicitly focused on ethics to identify specific practices professionals use in IDT to surface ethical considerations and tensions and devise creative solutions. In our analysis, reflective practice appears to be a pervasive strategy primarily taking the form of reflection-in-action (Schön, 1983) where designers pause intentionally to reflect on ethical dimensions of the problem then decide what to do next based on that reflection. Designers also used a suite of interrogative methods and techniques namely through the use of critical design, speculative design, and futurisms where critique was used to prompt or generate possible alternative designs and options. These cases also illuminated how designers translate ethics into an applied aspect of their work through various approaches, methods and techniques. In our study, we identified nine different design approaches, seven different design methods, and nine techniques across the 18 articles that designers used to take a more applied approach to ethics.