Ethics Workshop

On the 5th of May John Spencer, PhD Researcher Miriad MMU. gave a workshop about ethics and how we in the design industry are affected. We discussed a number of different scenarios where we had to make decision which in some, the outcomes ended in a hypothetical death. We were then asked why it was we chose that decision and whether it was ethically right. I found this workshop very interesting, as it's something that I've never particularly looked into in the past.

Examples of ethical issues specific to art, architecture, design, and media may include:

• Art practice and political interventions
• Digital media and the question of copyright
• Public exhibition
• Competency, risk and creative production
• Transgressive art practice and shock values
• Media privacy, Censorship, Accuracy, Fairness and Bias

John spoke of a two-part reflection exercise that has been trialled over the last 4 years as a research project within Miriad. It has been designed with the intention to not restrict creative freedoms or introduce unnecessary paperwork but encourage researchers to identify, evaluate and respond to ethical issues they might encounter. We were informed that they were not only offering this out to post graduate students but to under graduate students now too; to be used as a way of identifying whether there are any ethical issues associated with your project and to be able to plan a response to any issues raised.

Today I received the email containing the interactive PDF file for me to fill out and send back. Whilst completing the online form I found some of it quite difficult to use. For example the rollovers that reveal more information about the question, I found these were difficult to control as they didn't disappear after reading the information and therefore covered the majority of the rest of the form which made it hard to carry on answering the remaining questions. However, I do still think the idea behind it is very strong and would be beneficial to every practice once the minor problems were rectified.