Postdoc in Design Ethics in Practice

The Department of Digital Design & Information Studies within the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University invites applications for a postdoctoral position studying digital design ethics in practice. The postdoc position is affiliated with the research project ‘DEEP: Design Ethics in Practice’ funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

The Postdoc position is a full time and 2-year fixed-term position. The position begins on 01 September 2024 or as soon as possible thereafter.

The School of Communication and Culture is committed to diversity and encourages all qualified applicants to apply regardless of their personal background.

Project

As digital technology permeates most aspects of our lives, there is a growing awareness that ethics is a central concern for designers and developers of technology. Even though ethics has a long history within design, human-computer interaction, and related disciplines, relatively little is known about how design practitioners and technology developers, working in commercial settings, understand and deal with ethics as part of their practice. The central research questions guiding the DEEP project are how do design practitioners understand and deal with ethics in their work, and how might we develop new concepts, tools, and techniques to better deal with the ethics of designing digital technology? To address these questions, the project will engage with designers, developers and others working in commercial settings to explore digital design ethics in practice. The main outcomes of the project will be case studies that show how ethics is understood and dealt with in practice and a framework for understanding the main factors and dynamics at play regarding design ethics. Moreover, the project will collaborate with partner companies to co-design new concepts and tools for better dealing with ethics in practice.

Postdoc position

The postdoc will focus on studying how diverse practitioners deal with design ethics as part of their everyday practice in organizational settings. The main part of the research will consist of empirical work involving interviews and observations taking place at a number of Danish companies that design and develop digital products. Also, the postdoc will take part in facilitating co-design workshops to develop tools and concepts to deal with ethical issues and in developing a theoretical framework synthesising the results of the project.

The postdoc will collaborate closely with the project manager, Christian Dindler, and the partner companies of the DEEP project. Also, the applicant is invited to engage with the broader research groups around the DEEP research project: the Center for Computational Thinking and Design  and the Interaction Design research programme  which bring together a broad range of researchers across a wide spectrum of Interaction Design and Human-Computer Interaction topics.