Ethical Encounters in Design Practice: A Framework Grounded in Practitioner Experience

This paper presents a framework of ethical encounters in design practice, grounded in 98 accounts of practitioners’ experiences with ethics in their work. While HCI and design scholarship have produced a growing body of empirical work on design ethics, less attention has been given to concept-building informed by practice. Building on practice-oriented design ethics research in HCI, we define ethical encounters as practitioner-identified situations that expose tensions and value-laden decisions, emerging from the situated realities of day-to-day design work. Our analysis reveals three key dimensions of these encounters: the perceived issues, the actions taken to navigate them, and the new capacities emerging through them. Our analysis also considers how these dimensions play out differently across project phases. The framework offers a shared language and practical guidance for understanding and engaging with ethical challenges, and it contributes by framing ethical encounters as generative for relationships, ideas, and directions in HCI and design practice.