"SHOULD DESIGN BE ETHICAL: AN ACCOUNT OF PRACTICE" Conference Paper Publication

“Why should designers be responsible for what happens afterwards?” This question, raised by a student during a workshop on research ethics, became the starting point of this pedagogical reflection. The discussion did not concern plagiarism, informed consent, or institutional approval, but a more fundamental disagreement about whether designers and researchers should be accountable for the foreseeable consequences of their decisions. Rather than viewing this resistance as a misunderstanding to be corrected, this paper argues that it exposed two contrasting understandings of ethics within contemporary design education. One positions ethics as procedural compliance, fulfilled through approval processes and institutional regulations. The other understands ethics as an ongoing practice of judgement that requires continual reflection on responsibility, power, representation, and the futures that design interventions may produce. Drawing on a critical classroom incident, this paper reflects on how disagreement transformed my understanding of teaching research ethics. I argue that the role of design education is not simply to teach ethical rules, but to cultivate students’ capacity to make ethical judgements in situations where no single correct answer exists. Rather than avoiding disagreement, design educators should embrace it as a pedagogical resource through which students learn to question assumptions, justify decisions, and recognise the ethical implications of their own research practice.