Registration open for Informed Experiences, Designing Consent Symposium on April 6th

Designs, whether implicitly or explicitly, cite core values that drive their development and marketing. Efficiency and profit are two common principles that push design.

Informed Experiences, Designing Consent offers a space to consider centering consent as a core value of design. We invite creative individuals, researchers, ethicists, and designers, especially those with burning questions, critical theories, and insightful projects about design practices and consent, to join us for this one-day event on April 6, 2019 at Illinois Tech’s Downtown Campus (565 W. Adams). While we are talking about design and consent, we welcome people working on theoretical, reflective, and reception/audience perspectives of these concepts and encourage interested people to register for this event!

This symposium will use a “Learn, Make, Reflect” Model to interrogate the intersections of consent and design of interactive media and technologies. Here, we use panels, workshops, and discussion for attendees to prototype designs that center on consent and iterate on this process. We will provide simple prototyping materials for groups to collaborate on exploring the intersections of theory and practice in our maker-sessions.

Informed Experiences, Designing Consent is hosted by the Illinois Institute of Technology Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions and the HASTAC Scholars fellowship program. It is organized by Michael Anthony DeAnda, Elisabeth Hildt, Kelly Laas, and Leilasadat Mirghaderi with generous sponsorship from the Coleman Foundation.

CSEP receives NSF Funding for Ethics Education Library

The Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions has received funding from the National Science Foundation to continue its collaboration with the National Academy of Engineering's Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society as part of the project, "Transforming Ethics Education: Connecting STEM Faculty, Research Administrators, and Ethics Education Resources through the Online Ethics Center." As a partner, CSEP will receive $145,000 over the next three and a half years to both improve the Ethics Education Library and the Ethics Codes Collection,as well as continue to assist in expanding and improving the Online Ethics Center.

The goal of this project is to update and improve the Online Ethics Center (OEC). The investigators will do so by better engaging faculty and administrators who are new to teaching ethics, and by conducting a series of workshops with the user community that will enable them to gather multiple types of social science data and systematically assess how the OEC can better meet the needs of its constituents. Grant funds will also be used for regular site maintenance and to hire an expert external evaluator to formally assess OEC's activities and aid the investigators in improving site usability and updating the resource collection that they provide. Together, these efforts will help improve the quality of STEM ethics education and encourage and equip U.S. researchers to engage in ethical scientific practice.