Sharon Lindberg

My background

I have a MSc in Business Administration, a B.A. in Philosophy, and 20+ years of work experience as a designer of mostly digital things. Want to know more about my earlier work? Visit me at LinkedIn.

The "so what" of my research

Recent years have seen an increased interest in ethically responsible design, e.g. questions surrounding surveillance and big data, dangers related to AI, negative impact of social media, and “dark patterns” in design. Frameworks, guidelines and a plethora of other initiatives have been proposed for handling these issues. However, fewer studies have enquired into how ethics is perceived and cultivated among designers themselves. This is why my PhD project is doing just that: exploring ethics in design practices from the point of view of design practitioners. The goal of the research is two-fold. First, to understand what “ethics” might mean to designers of tech. Second, to co-create viable ways to cultivate ethics in design practice.

Publications

• Doing Good Business? Design Leaders' Perspectives on Ethics in Design (2024)
  S Lindberg, C Rossitto, O Knutsson, P Karlström, S Männikkö Barbutiu
  Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, GROUP, Article 2 (January 2024), 22 pages.
• Cultivating ethics with professional designers (2023)
  S Lindberg, P Karlström, S Männikkö Barbutiu
  No 10 (2023): NORDES 2023: THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK, ISSN 1604-9705
• Teaching Tech Ethics in Practice – Situating Ethics in Social Relationships (2021)
  T Ceratto Pargman, S Lindberg
  Workshop position paper for Co-Designing Resources for Ethics Education in HCI at CHI'21
• Design Ethics in Practice – Points of Departure (2021)
  S Lindberg, P Karlström, S Männikkö Barbutiu
  Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 5, No. CSCW1, Article 130
• Cultivating Ethics – A Perspective from Practice (2020)
  S Lindberg, P Karlström, S Männikkö Barbutiu
  NordiCHI '20: Proceedings of the 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Shaping Experiences, Shaping Society. Online/Tallin, Estonia
• The Levinas Game – Using Design Games to Explore the Intersection of Philosophy and HCI (2019)
  S Lindberg, P Karlström
  Workshop position paper for Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Exploring the Intersection of Philosophy and HCI at CHI'19, Glasgow, Scotland, UK

Other materials

In my research I strive to produce concrete and practice-led outputs for cultivating ethics in practice. These are two examples of such research outputs.

• The Design Ethics Workshop This workshop provides a space and structure for exploring and becoming ethical together. By doing this, participants can create common visions of what ethically responsible design means and how to get there. The workshop is intended to be simple and easily adaptable, to fit with design practice, to foster curiosity and collaboration around ethics, and to kick-start the cultivation of more ethical design based on matters that participants themselves understand and care about.
• Sparking Conversations – a design brief for cultivating ethics in design Design briefs are commonly used in design practice by groups/teams, collaboratively unpacking the problem and solution space. This brief is thus a familiar format but in an unfamiliar realm – the realm of ethics. It asks the question “How might we raise awareness of ethically responsible design?”