Playing with ethics

With this method you can encourage design students to understand, approach and reflect ethics in a more tangible and playful way. PLAYING WITH ETHICS takes departure the senses and embodied experience of ethical dilemmas. By using materials to explore and make an instillation that situates other students in an ethical dilemma. 

Preparation 
3-5 hours.

Activity 
1 hour for blind tasting.
30 hour to explore materials.
1 hour to define an ethical dilemma based on the materials.
1 hour to design the material instillation.

Follow-up 
30 minutes to reflect on PLAYING WITH ETHICS and how ethics were sensed by using materials.

Materials 
Secondhand materials, food, spoon, blindfold, glue and general craft materials

Energy Level 

Slow and concentrated.

Researchers/Facilitators 
Facilitates the process and helps out along the way.

Participants 
Minimum 2 groups of minimum 3 students each. The participants shall be from 14-100 of age.

Play(ful) approach 
Sensory play, dark play, playful tension.

Expected Output 
Sensory experience, knowledge about ethics, reflections, fun in groups. 

PLAYING WITH ETHICS aims towards making design students reflect on ethics. Ethics is often a philosophical theme which requires much reading and theoretical precision to understand. Or else ethics is often something we write down on paper before or after a design collaboration. This method takes departure in, that ethics is felt and sensed.

By working together in groups of 3-5, students are to get a deep sensory understanding of how to sense ethics. This is done by participating in a food blind-tasting. The Danish philosopher Løgstrup said that ethics is about holding another person in your hands and having the responsibility to ensure that the person is treated well. The food blind-tasting makes one person find food that the other student should taste blindfolded. Not being able to see evokes a sensory registration of eating something you do not know what is. That tasting can either be sweet, sour, hot, unpleasant, comfortable, hurting or evoke other sensory registrations. Hereby the student that can see, holds the other student in the hands. Herafter, they switch roles.

After this exercise, materials are layed out on tables and the students are to explore the materials and individually choose a material that might call forth or encourage an ethical question, dilemma or feeling or be provoking, have a strong sensory surface, being sharp or slightly dangerous. In groups the students look at and explore the chosen materials. Based on a few materials they are to develop an ethical dilemma. They get longer time to make an installation which must present or confront the observer to an ethical dilemma.

• Designing with fur.
• Designing with chemicals.
• Designing a machine where you can help people for an active death.

The method has been developed and used in design education to explore ethics through sensory practices. Participants first experienced trust, responsibility and vulnerability through a blind tasting before translating these experiences into material explorations and installations presenting ethical dilemmas. The process encouraged participants to reflect on ethics as something that can be sensed through the body as well as discussed, creating a shared basis for dialogue about ethical questions in design.