PROVOKING ETHICAL AWARENESS AT A DESIGN WORKSHOP ON THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION

Innovation has been a major force for improving economic and social conditions for humans. Yet, it has also brought a number of unintended and often unpredictable consequences that affect potentially all stakeholders. Debates over 'the responsibility of innovation' have become commonplace in industrial and social forums alike. Technological innovations, especially, are often viewed as a pressure on normative ethics that exclude unrestricted or flexible options. This paper draws upon the outcomes of a 4-day interactive design workshop attended by fifty-six graduate students on the subject of the 'education of the future' at a higher education institution in China. Moral dilemmas were incorporated in the project activities during the design thinking process [1]. By imagining the future of education through creativity techniques, uncertainties from the macro environment of the innovation were revealed and used as tools for the design propositions. This paper aims to illustrate how exploring unknown and potentially problematic situations can help students develop an awareness of the ways ethical considerations can generate legitimate ideas for developing questions that could lead to new design solutions. Although the reflections described in this paper are limited to the experience of the workshop, the value of providing a reproducible framework by which design education facilitators may address ethical dilemmas in problem-based learning contexts, is briefly discussed.