ETHICS IN DESIGN EDUCATION, BUT COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: TEACHING THROUGH INTERACTIVE INSTALLATIONS

In a collaboration between the University of Twente and the Saxion University of Applied Sciences ethics education is explored from a tool-based, practical perspective. In this ongoing project the focus lies on the question if and how practical tools for ethical deliberation can be helpful in ethics education for engineering students. To adhere to the practical perspective, the approach uses a focus on the impact of technology as a way toward ethical deliberation. The idea is that engineering students should actively take the probable, desirable, and possibly unwanted effects of their designs into account during the development of their projects. To foster this process, we have the desire to build an ethics lab, analogous to an engineering lab or a design studio. As part of this ethics lab two students of the bachelor Creative Technology have designed an interactive installation to let the visitors of this lab experience classical ethical dilemmas in a contemporary manner. This paper will present the installations -representing Plato's cave and the Panopticon- as well as some preliminary experiences with "teaching ethics through interactive installations".