Mock TRIAL As A METHOD FOR ETHICAL DESIGN

While the increasing use of inter-disciplinary modes of participation indicates a desire to broaden the scope of discourse in HCI, methods to generate collective discussion on emerging technologies broadly and IoT privacy and trust in particular are currently lacking. We see here an opportunity for HCI to borrow methods from other disciplines and apply these creatively to involve people in the design of IoT and other emerging technologies.

 To illustrate this, we describe how we borrowed the method of the Mock Trial from legal studies and implemented it successfully to frame new problems for IoT design. Three Mock Trials were staged as a series of participatory legal thought experiments in workshops with twenty-two experts from the law, technology and policy design. The understanding of dialogue as “puzzling through” problems makes the tactic particularly relevant to design and to the design of technology where, technical instruments of increasing complexity collide with the very ethical, political and human or rather ‘entangled’ questions HCI researchers are seeking to address.