This paper presents a framework of ethical encounters in design practice, grounded in 98 accounts of practitioners’ experiences with ethics in their work. While HCI and design scholarship have produced a growing body of empirical work on design ethics, less attention has been given to concept-building informed by practice. Building on practice-oriented design ethics research in HCI, we define ethical encounters as practitioner-identified situations that expose tensions and value-laden decisions, emerging from the situated realities of day-to-day design work. Our analysis reveals three key dimensions of these encounters: the perceived issues, the actions taken to navigate them, and the new capacities emerging through them. Our analysis also considers how these dimensions play out differently across project phases. The framework offers a shared language and practical guidance for understanding and engaging with ethical challenges, and it contributes by framing ethical encounters as generative for relationships, ideas, and directions in HCI and design practice.

As emerging technologies continue to shape society, a growing body of work is engaging with design ethics as it unfolds in practice to better capture the complexities of ethical considerations embedded in day-to-day work. Positioned within the broader “turn to practice” in HCI, this paper brings together this body of work as an emerging research area, characterizing its motivations, conceptual positionings, methodologies, and contributions through a review conducted across a range of design disciplines and academic databases. The findings reveal a shift away from static and abstract ethical frameworks toward an understanding of ethics as an evolving, situated, and inherent aspect of design activities, one that can be cultivated and fostered collaboratively. We propose six future directions to establish common research priorities and stimulate the area’s growth. While the paper promotes cross-disciplinary dialogue, we argue that HCI research, given its cumulative experience with practice-oriented research, is well-equipped to guide this emerging research area on design ethics.

Design is not neutral but involves ethical aspects, from addressing power dynamics to enabling broader accessibility and inclusion. In industry settings, design leaders can play an essential role in promoting ethical design by, for instance, setting visions, developing and advocating values, and providing guidance for design. Through co-design workshops with ten design leaders working in Sweden, we investigated how these professionals envision the cultivation-that is, the development, promotion, and dissemination-of ethically responsible design. Our study outlines what the participants regard as the main problems that stifle ethical design and designing, and how to practically address them. The findings highlight that design leaders consider the lack of awareness about the ethical dimensions of design to be one of the main problems. Additionally, they point to various strategies for addressing the problems, such as communicating compelling reasons for prioritizing ethics, creating inclusive and welcoming spaces for collaborative problem-solving and learning about ethics, and folding ethics into current practices. This could involve, for instance, adding the dimension of ethics to 'design critique' sessions, or re-evaluating portfolio reviews to prioritize diversity in recruitment. We conclude by discussing design leaders' potential for furthering ethically responsible design, and provide a practical tool, a design brief, to support this endeavor.

Recent years have seen an increased interest in ethically responsible design of technology in society at large as well as among design practitioners. While design ethics is a well-established research area, less research has enquired into how design practitioners understand ethics. Through semi-structured interviews we have explored practitioners' approaches to ethics in design. Our findings show noticing, reflecting and reacting as three ways that ethical matters are approached. This ties into dynamic and participatory views on ethics, rather than viewing ethics as a set of formal frameworks and deductive reasoning practices. Practitioners need approaches that tie in to existing work practices. Our results provide practice-led suggestions and points of departure of when and how it might be suitable to infuse design ethics into design practice.