# Design Ethics & Speculative Futures

**Track:** Systems, Strategy & Frontier — Design & Human-Centered Design — proposed (25)
**Framework / surface:** design
**Level:** Advanced
**Prerequisites:** Participatory & Co-Design, Designing With & For AI

**In one line:** Consequences, values, and futures — value-sensitive design, speculative design, dark patterns, sustainability.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Design carries consequences, so ethics is not a finishing coat but structure. Batya Friedman's value sensitive design, formalized in the 1990s, treats human values — privacy, autonomy, justice — as first-class design criteria, surfaced through stakeholder analysis rather than assumed. Victor Papanek's "Design for the Real World" (1971) had already indicted designers for serving consumption over need and ecology. The inverse is deception: Harry Brignull named "dark patterns" in 2010, now reframed as deceptive patterns and outlawed by the EU Digital Services Act's Article 25, applicable across the EU since February 2024. Against complicity, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby's "Speculative Everything" (2013) uses design fictions to interrogate futures before we build them.

## References

- [Value sensitive design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_sensitive_design)
- [Deceptive Patterns (Harry Brignull)](https://www.deceptive.design/)
- [Speculative design (Dunne & Raby)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_design)