Digital Ethics Compass

The Digital Ethics Compass toolkit helps organisations make the right decision 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 ethically and how to use this as a competitive advantage. We briefly explain both parts.

This toolkit goes beyond purely responsible AI and also looks specifically at the ethics behind behavioural design, which is also widely used in digital products. The compass thus provides a complete checklist for the ethical evaluation of your entire system, from data to programming and interface design. The workshop thereby provides an extra layer to see how ethics can also become a permanent part of your organisation.

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 of the card set. In the centre of the circle are the most important design principles for the 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.

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 ethically. 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 organisation.

The Design Ethics Compass is a tool from Danish Design Center, a design agency in Copenhagen that deploys design and design thinking on 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.

This tool was not developed by the Knowledge Centre 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 Centre is not responsible for the quality of the tool.

The digital compass and all downloads can be found on the Danish Design Center's external website.