Cultivating ethics sensitivity in design: Impact of integrating ethics within K-12 digital design education

The use of persuasion has become ubiquitous within digital technologies to maximize revenue, gather users’ personal data, and increase engagement. However, literature has highlighted the phenomenon of dark designs which influence users into acting against their best interests. It has been argued that to address the issue of dark designs in the digital context, there is a need to integrate formal ethics education within design pedagogy and practice. Recent years have seen the introduction of ethics in university level curriculums, but there are few reports of integrating ethics within school education. To address this gap, we developed an educational module on persuasive digital design with integrated content on ethics for Class IX school students. This module was introduced to 419 students enrolled in five public schools in Delhi (India) as part of an introductory digital design course. Two classroom activities were conducted to observe the impact of this educational intervention. In the first activity, it was observed how the impact of ethics education reflected in students’ design outcomes. In the second activity, it was found that students became more critical in their normative assessments of designs after being introduced to ethical concerns. The findings show that ethics education integrated within digital design curriculums can cultivate ethics sensitivity. We discuss the implications of these findings for the development of ethics-focused design pedagogy.