Piloting Methods
International Networking
Knowledge Exchange

IsITethical ?Boardgame

Exploring ELSI of IT through a tabletop game

Lead by: Malé Luján Escalante

This board game explores Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) of Information Technologies (IT) for the Disaster and Risk Management (DRM) domain. The game aims to support circumspect discussions of issues emerging at cross-border, cross-sector, interoperation and data management such as privacy, trust, accountability, non-discrimination, and security.

IsITethical? board game is both a tool and a process of collaboratively building worlds in which ELSI guidance can be discussed, developed further and applied in preferable near futures.

The original idea emerged from the research deliverables of the ELSI work package of SecInCoRe (2014--17), a large-scale EU funded research project concerned with IT for DRM Common Information Spaces (CIS). SecInCoRe's first prototype of the game was further developed and tested in the context of IsITethical?Exchange (2017--2019), a UK Research Innovation funded service co-design project, that explores the idea of ethical impact assessment as a creative collaborative process.

This project began as a way to make ELSI guidance accessible, but ultimately opened the way for a much bigger journey, including an online community of practitioners, a living knowledge base, a travelling tool kit for ethical impact assessment service, a methodology to do ethics, and the developing of Ethics through Design framework, that both reformulates ideas of Ethics and ideas of Design Research using play.

Related publications:

Escalante, M. A. L., Büscher, M., Petersen, K., Kerasidou, X., Gradinar, A., & Alter, H. (2019, September). IsITethical? board game: Playing with speculative ethics of IT innovation in disaster and risk management. In Proceedings of the IX Latin American Conference on Human Computer Interaction (pp. 1-8) available here