CHS: Small: Improving Everyday Ethics in Socio-technical Practice

结合人类和计算元素的复杂社会技术系统在从在线商务到算法支持的决策，再到智能电网和自动驾驶汽车等网络物理系统等领域对社会产生重要影响。随着这些系统在流行度、复杂性和规模上的增长，有关如何设计和部署它们的伦理考虑也相应增长。各种学科和角色的从业者，包括用户体验（UX）设计师、数据科学家、软件开发人员、产品经理等，都站在如何设计和构建这些系统的第一线，并在决定这些系统在多大程度上以及在多大程度上解决了这些道德考虑方面发挥着关键作用。本研究将调查从业人员在道德方面的经验和态度，利用这些见解开发方法来提高从业人员的日常道德意识和行动，并开发教育材料和经验，以培养未来的设计师和技术人员成为更好的“日常伦理学家”。为了实现这些目标，该项目将努力描述影响社会技术设计实践的道德问题，从而创造出提高从业者道德意识和行动的方法。前两组研究将试图从实践者的角度识别和描述设计师面临的道德考虑、建模身份、学科、生态和社会因素，这些因素塑造、约束或使道德设计成为可能。这将通过一系列访谈、焦点小组、调查和分析从业者之间与道德和价值观相关的在线互动来完成。在这些发现的基础上，第三组研究将使用迭代参与式方法来创建、评估、改进和传播方法，通过一系列讲习班和部署来提高社会技术从业者的道德能力。这些研究应该会导致一个伦理意识和行动的生态模式，有可能指导未来的伦理教育和实践者主导的社会和设计责任研究。这项研究的结果有可能在各种实践背景下提高对包容性和用户代理的敏感性，从而导致更公平和负责任的社会技术系统。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Complex socio-technical systems that combine human and computational elements have important impacts on society in areas ranging from online commerce to algorithmically supported decision-making to cyber-physical systems such as smart grids and self-driving cars. As these systems grow in prevalence, complexity, and scale, ethical considerations correspondingly grow around how they are designed and deployed. Practitioners in a range of disciplines and roles, including user experience (UX) designers, data scientists, software developers, product managers, and others, are on the front lines of how these systems are designed and built and play a key role in determining how much and how well these systems address those ethical considerations. This research will investigate practitioners' experiences and attitudes around ethics, using those insights to develop methods to increase practitioners' everyday ethical awareness and action, and developing educational materials and experiences to train future designers and technologists to be better "everyday ethicists". To address these goals, this project will include efforts to characterize ethical concerns that impact socio-technical design practice, leading to the creation of methods that increase practitioners' ethical awareness and action. The first two sets of studies will seek to identify and describe ethical considerations designers face, modeling identity, disciplinary, ecological, and societal factors that shape, constrain, or enable ethical design from the practitioner perspective. This will be accomplished through a series of interviews, focus groups, surveys, and analysis of online interactions among practitioners that relate to ethics and values. Building upon these findings, a third set of studies will use an iterative participatory approach to create, evaluate, refine, and disseminate methods that increase the ethical capacity of socio-technical practitioners through a series of workshops and deployments. These studies should lead to an ecological model of ethical awareness and action with the potential to guide future ethics education and practitioner-led research on social and design responsibility. The outcomes of this research have the potential to increase sensitivity towards inclusivity and user agency in a variety of practice contexts, leading to more equitable and responsible socio-technical systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.