79. Ethics as Child’s Play: Sensitizing Children Early on About Design Ethics

The use of persuasion has become ubiquitous in design. It has been argued that persuasive design may coerce or manipulate users into acting in certain ways, which raises ethical concerns. However, designers are not being sufficiently educated about ethics within educational or professional institutions. On the other hand, design education is scaling up to enter school curriculums as well. We argue that there is a need to integrate ethics within design education in schools, to sensitize children toward ethics in design and to inculcate a critical perspective at an early age. To this end, we conducted a 4-h session on the topic of ‘persuasive design ethics’ with 66 school children in Delhi as part of an introductory digital design course. In this session, we conducted a pre/post in-classroom design activity to observe the impact of ethics education on students’ design outcomes. Through the analysis of pre/post activity sheets, we investigated how the effect of ethics education reflected in the design outcomes. Based on the findings, we argue for the importance of integrating ethics into design education as early as possible.