Teaching User Experience Design Ethics to Engineering Students: Lessons Learned

Contemporary dilemmas about the role and impact of digital technologies in society have motivated the inclusion of topics of computing ethics in university programmes. Many past works have investigated how different pedagogical approaches and tools can support learning and teaching such a subject. This brief research report contributes to these efforts by describing a pilot study examining how engineering students learn from and apply ethical principles when making design decisions for an introductory User Experience (UX) design project. After a short lecture, students were asked to design and evaluate the ethical implications of digital health intervention prototypes. This approach was evaluated through the thematic analysis of semi-instructed interviews conducted with 12 students, focused on the benefits and limitations of teaching ethics this way. Findings indicate that it can be very challenging to convey the importance of ethics to unaware and uninterested students, an observation that calls for a much stronger emphasis on moral philosophy education throughout engineering degrees. This paper finishes with a reflection on the hardships and possible ways forward for teaching and putting UX design ethics into practice. The lessons learned and described in this report aim to contribute to future pedagogical efforts to enable ethical thinking in computing education.