The Digital Ethics Compass toolkit
The Danish Design Center has released a toolkit to help companies make the right decisions from an ethical standpoint. The Digital Ethics Compass toolkit consists of two parts: a compass with different questions and recommendations and a workshop to jointly learn from the compass how to design digital products in an ethical way and how to use this as a competitive advantage. We briefly explain both parts.
The Danish Design Center is a design agency in Copenhagen that applies design and design thinking to the three most important transitions of our time: the digital, social and green transition. The Digital Ethics Compass was developed with the idea of making ethics an integral part of the digital transition.
What you should know before reading further:
For whom:everyone who influences decisions concerning the development of digital products
Process phase: design, development, evaluation
System component: entire system
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Price indication: free compass and templates, workshop moderation to book
The compass
The compass helps you ask the right ethical questions to avoid the most common design errors. The compass, shaped like a circle, is available as a digital tool, and as a paper version and card set. In the centre of the circle are the most important design principles for ethical development of digital products:
put people first
make your technology understandable
avoid creating inequality
give control to users
prevent manipulation
It is important to take these principles into account at all times during the development process.
The workshop
In a workshop of 1-3 days you can work as a team with the compass. In the workshop you will have a more general look at what it is like to develop digital products in an ethical way. You can also use the compass to be more specific about a certain project or product.
Invite all the people who influence the decisions that are made about the product. The more you can look at the design of the digital product from various perspectives, the better you can anticipate possible thresholds and shortcomings.
The workshop is professionally moderated by one of the partners who co-developed the compass. The templates are free to download, so with some insight and preparation you can also develop a workshop within your own organisation.
Conclusion
This toolkit goes beyond ethical AI to look specifically at the ethics behind behavioural design, which is also widely used in digital products. The compass provides a complete checklist for the ethical evaluation of your entire system, from data to programming and interface design. The workshop provides an extra layer to look at how ethics can become a permanent part of your organisation.
Links
The digital compass and all downloads can be found here.
This tool was not developed by the Knowledge Center Data & Society. We describe the tool on our website because it can help you deal with ethical, legal or social aspects of AI applications. The Knowledge Center is not responsible for the quality of the tool.