A practical framework for ethics: the PD-net approach to supporting ethics compliance in public display studies

Research involving public displays often faces the need to study the effects of a deployment in the wild. While many organizations have institutionalized processes for ensuring ethical compliance of such human subject experiments, these may fail to stimulate sufficient awareness for ethical issues among all project members. Some organizations even require such assessments only for medical research, leaving computer scientists without any incentive to consider and reflect on their study design and data collection practices. Faced with similar problems in the context of the EU-funded PD-Net project, we have implemented a step-by-step ethics process that aims at providing structured yet lightweight guidance to all project members both stimulating the design of ethical user studies, as well as providing continuous documentation. This paper describes our process and reports on 3 years of experience using it. All materials are publicly available and we hope that other projects in the area of public displays, and beyond, will adopt them to suit their particular needs.