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Abstract

The development of effective socio-technical information systems requires designers to balance ethical goals with functional capabilities and business objectives. To address this challenge, we propose EDGE, a novel ethical design method that focuses on two key activities in the systems development process—ethical grounding and evaluation of ethical impacts. We provide an empirical example of the EDGE method by applying it to the redesign of a sustainable application in the energy industry. This empirical example reveals the need for ethical clarity to ground and evaluate the app to achieve improved ethical performance and social impacts. We conclude with the implications of the new ethical design method and future research directions for its application and enhancement.

Keywords

Ethical design social good values green energy critical deconstruction and reconstruction ethical grounding and evaluation emancipation next-generation design method

Introduction

The quickening pace of innovation has fundamentally altered the adoption curve of information technology (IT) applications in recent years. In the past, early adopters represented only a small portion of the eventual adopters of a given innovation (Rogers, 1962). However, innovations today may experience global adoption within months, if not weeks, of launching. For instance, ChatGPT gained 100 million active users in 2 months (Hu, 2023). This rapid change in innovation diffusion accentuates the need for foresight regarding potential ethical issues these innovations may encounter. Unlike the days when developers could react to red flags as they appeared among the small group of early adopters, harm caused by emerging innovations today may affect millions of users before the signs of bias and possible harm are recognized. Further, addressing harms caused at a global scale is much more complex than addressing local harms. Thus, now more than ever, it is urgent for designers and developers to preemptively ground emerging IT applications in moral values and develop systematic ways of evaluating the ethical impacts.

Moral values and ethics are often sidelined in the information systems (IS) development process because managers and developers are in a rush to beat competitors to market. The often-contagious nature of emerging IT can additionally trigger a race for the most groundbreaking application of an innovation. When IS developers focus on “What can we create?” rather than “What should we create?” they tend to prioritize technical capabilities over ethical considerations (McGrath, 2024; Young et al., 2021b). Thus, many IS are not grounded in ethics and may result in unintended, adverse effects on social good at a global scale.

Since a focus on the technical capabilities of an artifact may come at the cost of oversight of social good, there have been calls for greater consideration of social impacts in the design process (De Leoz and Petter, 2018). Considering social impacts is important because when moral value systems and beliefs are ambiguous or even missing in design theories, both developers and researchers struggle to justify the value of their designs (Peffers et al., 2018) and may even introduce unintended adverse effects on social good. In recent years, researchers in management and IS have argued for the importance of values awareness and the inclusion of ethical considerations in the design process (Friedman et al., 2013; Monson, 2023; Nussbaumer et al., 2023). Despite efforts to build awareness and better integrate moral values into designs, researchers and developers still lack rigorous methods and tools to ground designs in comprehensive ethical frameworks and evaluate the degree to which designs achieve ethical outcomes.

Compelled by the need for more actionable methods to achieve social good in the design process, we propose a novel, more comprehensive approach—Ethical Design through Grounding and Evaluation (EDGE). This new approach focuses on five key activities essential for determining the social impacts of IS applications. EDGE gives system development practitioners and researchers a systematic, critical method to add to their toolbox for evaluating whether design choices move a socio-technical system closer to or further from an ethically grounded state. We base EDGE on well-defined and thoroughly vetted theories and philosophies of ethics. Integrating the critical research methods of deconstruction and reconstruction (Martin, 1990) as evaluation techniques, we propose a rigorous method for the evaluation of the ethical effects of IS on users.

We present the next-generation research method, EDGE, using an empirical case from practice. The case involves a project within a German energy utility that faced a moral dilemma when introducing green energy tariffs. Customers did not understand the principles underlying these tariffs and believed they had become victims of greenwashing. To restore trust and enhance transparency, the energy utility developed a customer loyalty app to promote and explain the use of green energy tariffs. We describe how they evaluated their initial system design and system redesign in five steps: (1) selection of an ethical kernel theory, (2) development of overarching ethical design principles using the kernel theory, (3) derivation of context-specific design rules from overarching design principles, (4) development of condition statements to describe the social impacts of a design corresponding to each design rule, and (5) evaluation of social impacts through reconstruction of the condition statements.

A persuasive advantage of the EDGE approach is that it brings abstract ethical kernel theories to life by implementing them in a well-defined design context. As such, this method provides researchers with the opportunity to test hard-to-implement theories in ways that can reveal flaws or inconsistencies in the kernel theories. In our case, we find that the kernel theory originally selected to evaluate the design and redesign of the app was scoped too narrowly to meet the organization’s needs. This was revelatory and led to the discovery of additional overarching design principles, informing a contribution to our kernel theory. This paper demonstrates how implementing ethical kernel theories and evaluating outcomes using EDGE can lead to theoretical contributions and better practical outcomes. We conclude with a discussion of limitations and future research directions.

Background

There is a rich tradition of design research in IS (see Appendix A). Recent directions have focused on the use of ethical theories to incorporate non-functional, value-based requirements into the design process. For example, Bichler et al. (2021) study how truthfulness, efficiency, and fairness could guide the design of software for matching preferences, and Monson (2023) uses social kernel theories to develop design principles for sustainable development. Kane et al. (2021) draw on the Theory of Emancipatory Pedagogy to design principles for an emancipatory assistant to help users navigate oppressive information environments online. Other notable examples of how ethical theories can be used as kernel theory include Nussbaumer et al. (2023)’s paper about ethical emergency management and Wass et al. (2023)’s work on how social inclusion theories can inform design for more inclusive IT. These works provide examples of how specific ethical theories can inform the design of artifacts. However, they do not offer a comprehensive and actionable approach of how design can be ethically grounded using well-defined theory and then be evaluated systematically over time.

To improve the incorporation of values during the design process, Friedman et al. (2013) developed value sensitive design (VSD) as a research method. VSD has been employed in a wide variety of contexts, such as crowdsourcing (e.g., Deng et al., 2016), computer-mediated work (e.g., Boyd et al., 2016), health information systems (e.g., Walton and DeRenzi, 2009), and mobile technology (e.g., Le Dantec et al., 2009). VSD identifies which stakeholder values should be reflected in a system’s design (Deng et al., 2016; Friedman et al., 2013). The VSD method represents an important advancement in ethical design; however, its focus on individual stakeholder’s values brings a risk of overlooking values not championed by sampled stakeholders. VSD also risks conflating stakeholders’ benefits with moral values and ignoring important values that are not emphasized by the identified stakeholders (Le Dantec et al., 2009; Manders-Huits, 2011). The exclusion of other stakeholders (Le Dantec et al., 2009) and conflicting value systems among stakeholders (Manders-Huits, 2011) are additional challenges that VSD needs to address. The VSD method does not currently provide clear guidance on how conflicting values can be balanced to promote a higher-level ethical philosophy or framework that an organization desires to follow (Manders-Huits, 2011; Winkler and Spiekermann, 2018).

Notably, reinforcing stakeholders’ preferences is not necessarily the same as ethical grounding. Fundamental and universal values, such as human well-being, justice, and dignity, have been found missing in some projects involving a VSD approach (Umbrello, 2018). VSD may not be sufficient to address the complex and diverse values that are relevant to the masses of users affected by emerging and global IS (Van de Poel, 2020). Moreover, there is little guidance for the assessment of systems designed using a VSD approach or for the comparison of competing designs. Hence, there is room for a new, complementary approach that grounds design in established, comprehensive philosophies, theories, and frameworks of ethics and moral values that can be assessed during system operations. We summarize a comparison of VSD and EDGE in Table 1.

Table 1.

Comparing VSD and EDGE.

Key differences	VSD	EDGE
Stage of design	VSD accounts for human values in the initial design process.	While EDGE can be applied to the initial design process, a distinct advantage of this approach is that it promotes the iterative ethical grounding of a system post-implementation, during operations and evolution stages.
Whose values prevail	The term value in VSD represents what is important to the sampled stakeholders. What is important to stakeholders, e.g., their own objectives or privileges, may not be ethical according to broader ethical frameworks. Thus, VSD risks conflating stakeholders’ benefits with moral values and ignoring important values that are not emphasized by the stakeholders. Moreover, when stakeholders’ values conflict, designers lack clarity on whose values to privilege.	Rather than relying on users to define values, EDGE draws on a kernel theory of ethics or emancipation to evaluate the outcomes of an existing system comprehensively. In this approach, it is theory, rather than users, that determines which values are prioritized.
How designs are critiqued	Critique of a system designed using VSD involves ad hoc judgments and may not be fruitful because the conversation stays on the surface-level when design decisions are based on user preferences. Each user may deem their values more important than others’ values. Simply following the values of the majority or most vocal stakeholders may not result in ethical design.	By clearly identifying ethical goals from an overarching theory, this method makes transparent the philosophical assumptions and ethical frameworks that are being followed. Doing so allows designers to check for philosophical consistency systematically by following the steps of critical de/re-construction. This method also allows anyone challenging the system design or championing one design over another to “get to the heart of the issue” more quickly by explaining what it is about the underlying ethical theory or philosophical assumptions they disagree with.

Critical Research Theory (Monson, 2023) outlines a structured approach to assessing the capability of an IS artifact to deliver its intended values effectively. This method represents another important step toward ethical design but focuses primarily on the problem formulation stage without guidance for evaluating or comparing different designs after implementation. The lack of a methodology to continually reevaluate the extent to which a design is rooted in, perhaps changing, values of an organization post-implementation is particularly problematic for those seeking to promote social good through IS. Our paper addresses this need for a more comprehensive method by proposing EDGE as a viable approach that can incorporate ethical frameworks in design and evaluate the design outcomes based on the ethical framework.

The EDGE approach

Ethical Design through Grounding and Evaluation (EDGE) provides a rigorous, comprehensive, and integrative approach to promoting the ethical grounding of information systems applications with compelling evidence of social impacts that can be measured using strong evaluation methods. We envision two scenarios for the use of EDGE by system development project teams.

In the first scenario, as shown in Figure 1, the project team can perform parallel activities to determine stakeholder needs and establish ethical grounding during the iterative development of the information system. Stakeholders provide detailed functional, quality, and value needs that are reconciled into system requirements via cost and tradeoff analyses. At the same time, these requirements must be tested against ethical kernel theories on which the entire information system is grounded. Building on the best practices of agile development, it is not only the information system but also the smaller component units that undergo iterative development and testing sprints. That is, the iterative testing of the information system includes an evaluation of social impacts at all levels of unit testing, subsystem testing, systems testing, and customer acceptance testing. In this way, the EDGE approach supports rigorous activities of ethical grounding and evaluation in the initial construction and operation of the information system.

Figure 1.

EDGE in the IS development process.

In the second scenario, as shown in Figure 2, operational information systems have been designed and implemented with little attention to ethical theories and social good. EDGE can evaluate the social impacts of the current system design and support its redesign to improve social outcomes. This requires ethical grounding—either based on an initial or retrospectively adjusted social goal—by selecting a suitable ethical kernel theory to inform the system’s redesign. The kernel theory supports the development of overarching design principles, context-specific design rules, and condition statements related to each design rule. Condition statements are similar to user stories or use cases as they describe the conditions experienced by any stakeholder including users, external stakeholders, or even the application environment. Developing condition statements to describe the system’s social impact requires deep knowledge of users’ experiences. Surveys, observations, and personal experience using methodological tools from ethnography, case studies, or action research can inform the development of this knowledge. System data can deliver additional information about, for instance, ethical violations of individuals, groups, or society through monitoring or data sharing. Once condition statements have been developed, critical reconstruction structures the evaluation of the system’s adherence to moral values imputed from the kernel theory. Reconstruction is the process of examining texts by substituting keywords in condition statements to reveal hidden values that are fostered by the information system. The reconstruction process challenges and reframes the existing ethical context and resulting social impacts while also uncovering social impacts that could be achieved through redesign.

Figure 2.

EDGE in evolutionary redesign of information systems.

Abstracted into five steps that apply to both scenarios, EDGE describes how an ethical kernel theory can be chosen by the development team (Step 1). The clarity of values that comes from selecting a kernel theory with intentionality allows debates about which values should dominate and occur at a deep level, getting to the root of philosophical assumptions and design priorities. EDGE then illustrates how overarching design principles can be drawn from grounding on an ethical kernel theory (Step 2). These principles provide a baseline against which designs can be evaluated. Next, EDGE shows how the principles inform context-specific design rules for the focal technology (Step 3). This allows for moving from abstract theory to practical relevance.

Once the grounding steps are complete (Steps 1–3), the evaluation (Steps 4–5) of an initial design and later redesign reveals ways in which each design is more, or less, ethically grounded than alternative designs according to the kernel theory selected by the development team. The evaluation process in EDGE involves the development of condition statements to describe the social impacts of a design as they relate to the context-specific design rules (Step 4). These condition statements are then reconstructed using the established critical method (Step 5). The critical reconstruction process used to evaluate the social impacts of different designs provides a structured, systematic analysis of how the design impacts the ethical performance of the socio-technical system. This process also helps the development team imagine and redesign conditions that would be more ethically grounded, bringing the EDGE process full circle.

EDGE in practice: An ethically grounded energy customer loyalty app

The best way to showcase the relevance and effectiveness of EDGE is through an empirical example. We analyze a longitudinal case from the energy industry, where we could observe the use of EDGE in evaluating the design and redesign of a customer loyalty app of a German energy utility. The Stadtwerke Leipzig (energy utility) developed the NexoEnergy (customer loyalty) app to improve customer trust and transparency after the introduction of green energy tariffs. Customers did not understand how these tariffs worked and suspected the Stadtwerke Leipzig of greenwashing. To re-establish trust, developers sought a new app design that met higher standards of ethical corporate responsibilities. The initial app design was developed in 2018 and redesigned in 2020 after customer feedback and in anticipation of a larger rollout. As an example of the second scenario in which EDGE is useful, we evaluate the NexoEnergy app.

Originally, NexoEnergy’s operational capabilities were designed and implemented without the guidance of a clearly articulated ethical kernel theory. Following the redesign, EDGE is used to help ground and evaluate the social impacts of the original and new app designs and provide practical guidance to the NexoEnergy team as they consider future upgrades of the app.

We selected this case because the ethical dilemma resulting from the initial app design illustrates the general difficulties and pitfalls that organizations face when aiming for ethical design. The initial lack of values awareness and clashes with enacted values encumbered the design process. One of the authors had full access to the project documentation, workshop minutes, interviews, and focus groups. We also had the opportunity to work with the development team lead to triangulate and validate our project observations. Since the development team adopted a design science research (DSR) approach (Utz et al., 2023), observations from this project were well suited to corroborate our proposed next-generation method for evaluating ethical designs. We explain how EDGE was used to evaluate both the initial design and redesign of the NexoEnergy app and provide insights to the project team about how to achieve a deeper ethical grounding in the future evolutions of the app. We outline the five steps of EDGE as applied in the NexoEnergy case below. The goal of including this empirical case is not to contribute a unique, empirical study to the literature but to illustrate how EDGE can be applied.

Step 1: Select an ethical kernel theory

Designers and evaluators can draw from a plethora of different ethical kernel theories. Which kernel theory an organization selects is a corporate and context-dependent decision. Throughout the design process, the chosen kernel theory champions specific philosophies and moral values. While no kernel theory is perfect, established theories promote philosophical consistency and provide transparency about who developed the underlying values framework and whose moral values receive the most attention.

For our empirical illustration of EDGE, we draw on critical social theories of emancipation as kernel theory. Observations from the project and the subsequent redesign of the app indicate that NexoEnergy aimed to re-establish customer trust by emancipating the customer and providing them with full transparency of their energy mix and freedom to control their energy consumption and loyalty tokens. We follow the design philosophy of Kane et al. (2021) in the selection of our kernel theory. They present critical theories of emancipation as kernel theories that can facilitate the change from potentially oppressive designs toward emancipatory designs. Appendix B provides more information about the prominent streams of critical emancipation research in IS with guidance regarding their application to different IS phenomena.

Competing theorists offer different definitions of emancipation, emphasize different components of emancipation, and consider emancipation at different levels (e.g., individual, group, organizational, and society). Critical theories of emancipation are diverse, falling into at least four paradigms, including functionalism, social relativism, neo-humanism, and radical structuralism (Hirschheim et al., 1995; Hirschheim and Klein, 1989). There is consensus among the paradigms acknowledging a tendency toward an oppressive status quo that can only be overcome with an active struggle toward emancipation (Brooke, 2002). Developers of critical IS must choose a concrete definition of emancipation and outline a pragmatic way to achieve it. Failure to set clear goals will result in the prioritization of power holders’ moral values over the values of those with less power. With this in mind, we now outline the basic tenets of the kernel theory of emancipation we adopted for the illustration of EDGE.

Young et al. (2021), in their literature review and synthesis of research on emancipation in IS, identified four types of freedom. These four types of freedom comprise a typology of emancipation including freedom to act, freedom to think, freedom to belong, and freedom to express. Freedom to act relates to user agency. It is threatened when information systems subvert human users and when individuals experience computer-mediated control and punishment (Demetis and Lee, 2018; Young et al., 2021). An important theme in the literature on agency is an individual’s autonomy to author their own life (Díaz Andrade and Urquhart, 2012) and fill roles they choose for themselves (Young et al., 2021a).

Freedom to think relates to rationality. System design can shape users’ consciousness in overt and covert ways. How systems hide or present information can alter individual users’ cognition. Increasingly, systems are designed for users to expend minimum cognitive effort in decision-making. However, keeping users in the dark about decision-making can constrain their consciousness (Vieira da Cunha et al., 2015). System designs shape users’ interpretations of meaning, and design choices can limit an individual’s unconstrained rationalities (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992; Ortiz et al., 2019).

Freedom to belong relates to inclusion. Digital divides emerge when some sections of society gain access to information, knowledge, and technology while others are excluded (Córdoba and Midgley, 2008). IS studies have recognized the urgency to help individuals, groups, and communities who still struggle to adequately access and use information systems and technologies, that is, inclusion (e.g., Díaz Andrade and Doolin, 2019; Gorbacheva et al., 2019). Therefore, systems designed to promote inclusion can bring about economic and social benefits for individuals (Brousseau and Kraemer, 2003; Lin et al., 2015).

Freedom of expression relates to dialogue and individuals’ right to be heard. Dialogue is considered emancipatory when it is rational and promotes truth exposure, evaluation of claims, avoidance of premature topic closure, standardized content dissemination, and surfacing of diverse and competing frames (Miranda et al., 2016; Young et al., 2021). An ideal speech situation is one “free from any kind of distortion, any form of coercion and ideology” and uninfluenced by power dynamics (Cecez-Kecmanovic and Janson, 1999: p. 8). Emancipatory dialogue can be fostered when information systems are designed to facilitate discourse in ideal speech situations (Hansen et al., 2009).

Researchers applying the next-generation method of EDGE must identify underlying philosophical assumptions inherent to their chosen kernel theory. Though not all emancipatory theories distinguish between types of beings to give humans a special status above machines (e.g., Introna, 2009; Latour and Venn, 2002), we recognize special rights for sentient, living beings. In this research, we acknowledge human value and embrace the notion that humans and machines have distinct roles and rights. Therefore, the EDGE process focuses on how human users experience the four types of freedoms. We assume that humans inherently demand emancipation while machines do not. Thus, under this set of assumptions, it would be absurd to treat humans like machines or to treat machines like humans.

Prior research asserts that machines are useful for mindless tasks and humans for mindful tasks (Salovaara et al., 2019). Artificial intelligence blurs the lines between human and machine tasks (Young et al. 2021a). Yet, our distinction between humans and machines goes deeper than observations about the aptitude and task proficiency of each actor type. We draw on philosophical assumptions about the fundamental nature of humanity. Notably, this assumption may not be a great fit for all cases where EDGE can be applied. Evaluating other sophisticated systems may require the use of different ethical kernel theories and different philosophical assumptions. This is especially true for design theories related to innovative, intelligent technologies that excel at traditionally human tasks such as creating art, processing language, and composing music. Still, the steps involved in the EDGE method will remain the same regardless of the kernel theory and assumptions adopted by the researchers.

Step 2: Apply kernel theory to develop overarching, ethical design principles

The second step in EDGE is to identify and select overarching design principles based on the chosen kernel theory. Developing design principles from ethical kernel theories will be most straightforward when the kernel theory proffers key tenets in the form of a typology, taxonomy, checklist, or framework to set boundaries for the theory and related design principles. Kernel theory tenets and design principles may have a one-to-one correspondence, or the kernel theory may be abstracted into more or fewer design principles. For simplicity, our illustration presents a one-to-one correspondence between Young et al. (2021) four types of freedom and our overarching design principles, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2.

Ethical design principles for IS development.

Design principles	Objective
Design for freedom to act	Design systems to reduce constraints on users’ actions such that users have agency.
Design for freedom to think	Design systems to reduce constrained thought such that users have more robust rationality.
Design for freedom to belong	Designing systems to foster feelings of inclusion such that users of all backgrounds and demographics can experience access and belonging.
Design for freedom to express	Designing systems to promote “ideal speech environments” and support emancipatory discourse such that all users are free to express themselves as part of civil dialogue.

Step 3: Move from overarching design principles to context-specific design rules

Applying EDGE to our case study, we move from general design principles to context-specific design rules. We analyzed which functionalities of the NexoEnergy app involved or affected users’ agency. In consultation with the development team lead who worked on both the initial design and redesign, we discovered that freedom to act in this context means that users can control their energy consumption and, by tying the time of consumption to the presence of green energy in the grid, they have control over their energy footprint. It also means that users can control the incentive structure and how they redeem their rewards.

Following a similar procedure, we identified app functionalities involving or affecting users’ freedom to think, belong, and express themselves. Access to relevant consumption data and information on the energy mix is a design element that can constrain or foster an individual’s freedom to think and make rational decisions. Users’ freedom to belong depends on how well NexoEnergy bridges social and digital divides and enables role mobility within the community of energy producers, traders, and consumers. Freedom to express requires users to have a voice in NexoEnergy’s design process via communication channels with organizational representatives. In consultation with the app development team lead, we consolidated our observations and analyses on how the design principles were adhered to in NexoEnergy’s original design (see Table 3). While the design principles and objectives are rooted in a generalizable kernel theory, the purpose of this step was to move from abstract to specific design priorities by considering how selected ethical design principles could have been “acted out” in our case context.

Table 3.

Ethical design principles relevant to the energy utility app.

Design principle	Objective	Relevance to the app design
Design for freedom to act	Design systems to reduce constraints on users’ actions such that users have agency.	App users should have control over how they consume energy and their energy footprint. They should also have a say in how they cash in rewards for responsible energy use.
Design for freedom to think	Design systems to reduce constrained thought such that users have more robust rationality.	App users should have unconstrained access to all relevant data and information needed to understand their energy consumption and energy grid constraints so they can make informed, rational decisions about their energy use.
Design for freedom to belong	Design systems to foster feelings of inclusion such that users of all backgrounds and demographics can experience access and belonging.	App users should be involved in the energy community’s decision-making and could play leadership roles. Their involvement should not be constrained by their social or economic status, their green energy production levels, or their digital literacy.
Design for freedom to express	Design systems to promote “ideal speech environments” and support emancipatory discourse such that all users are free to express themselves as part of civil dialogue.	App users should facilitate two-way communication between users and organizational workers, including app developers, to ensure that all users’ voices are heard.

Once we developed a strong understanding of how the design principles apply to NexoEnergy, we formalized seven design rules (see Table 4). These ethical design rules focus the researchers’ attention on users’ experiences that are most important to the focal organization.

Table 4.

Design principles and design rules.

Design Principles	Design Rules
Design for freedom to act	Rule 1:	Users should have agency over how they use the app.
Design for freedom to act	Rule 2:	Users should have agency in choosing their reward structure and how they redeem rewards.
Design for freedom to think	Rule 3:	Users should have access to understandable, unconstrained, and secure data related to their energy consumption as they make energy consumption decisions.
Design for freedom to belong	Rule 4:	Users with varying digital literacy should be able to use the app effectively.
	Rule 5:	Users should collaborate with developers to co-create rules for app use.
	Rule 6:	The app should promote financial inclusion in the form of pathways to buying shares in renewable energy sources.
Design for freedom to express	Rule 7:	Users should be able to communicate suggestions, ideas, and critiques directly to relevant organizational representatives.

Step 4: Develop condition statements for each design rule

The development of condition statements allows actionable implementation and evaluation of design rules in the information system. Condition statements are descriptions of the experiences of one or more stakeholders who are affected by the information system. These condition statements must be carefully constructed to focus on the ethical impacts experienced by the stakeholders. Focusing on the stakeholders’ impacts and ethical considerations facilitates the reconstruction process described in step 5.

Design rule 1 in our case study is, “Users should have the agency over how they use the app.” For design rule 1, the initial design and redesign both resulted in users being able to set their own rules and adjust their energy consumption. To convert this rule to a condition statement, we wrote a statement about the conditions under each design. In writing the condition statement, it is important to use terms in the statement that can be substituted in the reconstruction processes. Considering these substitutions is probably the most challenging part of the EDGE method. It may involve the consideration of linguistic theories to identify which substitutions will reveal the moral values underlying a condition statement. Since we operate under the assumption that humans are distinct from machines in their rights to freedom, we decided to use the substitution terms “user” and “machine” to evaluate whether human users were given the freedoms they deserve. Being mindful of our desire to reconstruct the condition statements by substituting the term “user” with “machine,” we develop condition statements using the term “user.” For design rule 1, the condition statement is “Users can set their own rules to adjust green energy consumption.”

The second design rule concerns users’ control over reward redemption. In the initial design, NexoEnergy users had little control over how to redeem their rewards. That is, the users received reward tokens for setting green energy thresholds that would maximize their green energy consumption but could not redeem those tokens within the app, which is why they often went unused. Thus, we developed the initial condition statement: “Users have no control over reward redemption.” After NexoEnergy was redesigned, users had more agencies in how and when they could redeem their loyalty tokens. Due to space constraints and in the spirit of illustrating the EDGE process rather than documenting every detail of our case, we describe only two examples in the main text. The remaining condition statements developed to correspond with each design rule can be found in Table 5.

Table 5.

Condition statements for implementation and evaluation.

Design Rules	Condition Statement (Initial Design)	Condition Statement (Redesign)
Rule 1 (Agency)	Users can set their own rules to adjust green energy consumption.	Users can set their own rules to adjust green energy consumption.
Rule 2 (Agency)	Users have no control over reward redemption.	Users can choose how and when they redeem their loyalty tokens and can redeem them on a whim.
Rule 3 (Rationality)	Users do not have access to individual data points for decision-making.	Users have access to individual data points for decision-making.
Rule 4 (Inclusion)	Users find the app user-friendly and intuitive.	There are variations in users’ capabilities to use the system optimally.
Rule 5 (Inclusion)	A selected user group participated in the design process.	A larger user group participated in the design process.
Rule 6 (Inclusion)	Users’ pathways to buying shares in renewable energy sources were limited and not transparent.	Users can buy shares in renewable energy sources by redeeming sustainable energy production points accumulated in the app.
Rule 7 (Dialogue)	Users express concerns and ideas directly with NexoEnergy app developers.	Users report simple feedback to a dedicated department.

Step 5: Perform reconstruction to evaluate social impacts

EDGE draws on methods from critical research to evaluate the ethical grounding of system designs. Due to the abstract nature of ethics and the complexity of their evaluation, subjective interpretation is required to determine if a proposed ethical effort is, in fact, ethical in practice. Subjectivity in research has value, and subjective interpretations can be carried out systematically and rigorously (Sarker et al. 2018a, 2018b). Deconstruction offers a way to systematize and add rigor to the interpretation process. Deconstruction is an analytic strategy to examine language in texts. The term deconstruction has its origin in the works of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (Derrida, 1973) and is most associated with the practice of reading, interpreting, and writing texts. Essentially, deconstruction takes apart arguments, narratives, and plain language (Beath and Orlikowski, 1994). The resulting defamiliarization enables a close examination of different meanings that are socially constructed and brings hidden meanings to the fore (Wright et al., 2020). As such, deconstruction inherently involves challenging and reinterpreting the existing meaning of texts. Deconstruction also reveals “ideological assumptions in a way that is particularly sensitive to the suppressed interests of members of disempowered, marginalized groups” (Martin, 1990: 340).

Methods involving deconstruction have already guided IS researchers to develop theory from the study of systems design (Truex et al., 2000) and IT development documentation (Beath and Orlikowski, 1994). They can even help debunk myths surrounding fashionable IT (Howcroft, 2001). Though deconstruction has a longstanding tradition in management (e.g., Kilduff, 1993; Martin, 1990; Prasad and Mills, 2010), its full potential has not yet been leveraged within the IS discipline (Chiasson and Davidson, 2012).

An extension of deconstruction is reconstruction. Reconstruction is “a kind of proactive deconstruction” (Martin, 1990: 350) and supports the identification of ethical or unethical impacts of an operational socio-technical system. Reconstruction dissects statements to identify meanings through “an iterative process of rewriting that alters – using substitutions – only a few phrases of the text at any one time” (Martin, 1990: 350). When alterations fundamentally change the meaning of a statement, these small changes in wording can make adjacent phrases seem unnatural (Martin, 1990) or absurd. Reconstruction helps unveil tacit moral values and meanings in statements, providing a systematic process for challenging the status quo. It helps readers see how the world could operate under different ethical assumptions or moral values and supports the identification of de facto versus desired ethical outcomes. At the same time, reconstruction can identify where an organization’s claimed moral values do not align with the moral values they enact. A seminal example of reconstruction comes from Martin (1990), who reconstructed the statements of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a large, multi-national corporation to reveal underlying gender discrimination and assumptions about the public and private spheres: original: “We have a young woman who is extraordinarily important to the launching of a major new (product) […]. She has arranged to have her Caesarean yesterday in order to be prepared for this event […].” reconstructed: “We have a young woman who is extraordinarily important to the launching of a major new child… She has arranged to have her product introduced early yesterday in order to be prepared for this birth.” The reconstructed statement provides a stark contrast to the CEO’s statement, making apparent the priorities and values associated with each statement relative to the other. By analyzing statements using reconstruction, EDGE gets to the heart of the values underlying each design.

We can illustrate the reconstruction process in our case study. The condition statements developed in step 4 are our unit of analysis. The substitution we chose based on the distinction between humans and machines involves replacing the word “user” with “machine” in each condition statement. We now analyze if the reconstructed condition statement sounds absurd based on its semantic or logical incongruity (Levinson, 2000). Statements lacking thematic coherence cause cognitive dissonance, given the context and understanding of the underlying kernel theory. Thus, if humans and machines are truly treated as distinct beings, the reconstructed sentences should come across as absurd. This reconstruction process is described in Table 6.

Table 6.

The EDGE reconstruction process.

Step	Purpose	Outcome	Next step
Step A: Identify design priorities and use a kernel theory to develop emancipatory design principles and rules.	Emancipatory design theories allow understanding of what should be done, normatively, through design to move users toward emancipation.	The outcomes of step A are identification of relevant components of emancipation and design principles and rules for achieving those components of emancipation.	After identifying components of emancipation to pursue and developing initial design principles and rules, proceed to step B.
Step B: Create a statement describing the condition of the environment fostered by the system.	Expressing the condition makes it more concrete and makes visible implicit biases.	The outcome of step B is an understanding of the initial condition and the technology that fosters the condition.	Once you are familiar with the focal system and the condition it fosters, proceed to step C.
Step C: Reconstruct the statement by substituting keywords or phrases describing humans with words or phrases describing objects.	Reconstruction reveals whether humans are circulating as objects in their environment.	The outcome of step C is a determination of whether the initial condition is oppressive. This is done by asking: does the reconstructed sentence sound unnatural?	If the statement does not sound unnatural, proceed to step D. If the statement does sound unnatural, the condition is not deemed oppressive, and redesign is not recommended. Proceed to step F.
Step D: Apply the emancipatory design principles and rules developed in step A to develop emancipatory design condition statements.	These statements can guide designers as they recreate designs that progress toward emancipation.	The outcome of step D is a more concrete understanding of the emancipatory conditions that are being pursued.	Once you have a concrete understanding of the more emancipatory conditions you will pursue, proceed to step E.
Step E: Reconstruct the new condition statement.	Reconstruction reveals whether humans are circulating as objects in their environment under the new redesign.	The outcome of step E is an understanding of whether the new design condition is oppressive.	If the statement does sound unnatural, the condition is not deemed oppressive, and further redesign is not recommended. Proceed to step F. If the statement does not sound unnatural, go back to step D and reconsider what an emancipatory condition would be like.
Step F: Revisit the reconstruction process at regular intervals to promote sustained emancipation.	Revisiting this process over time hedges against tendencies toward oppression.	Designs that create social good outcomes for users and move users closer to emancipation.

Thus, the initial condition statement “Users can set their own rules to adjust green energy consumption” is reconstructed to become “Machines can set their own rules to adjust green energy consumption.” This reconstructed statement sounds absurd. Machines do not have preferences. The absurdity indicates that humans are not being treated as equivalent to machines. Thus, our evaluation shows that the conditions fostered by the initial design satisfy the first design rule. Further redesign is not required. Users’ ability to set their own rules and adjust green energy consumption did not change from the initial design to the redesign.

The initial condition statement for design rule 2 is “Users have no control over reward redemption.” The reconstructed statement is “Machines have no control over reward redemption.” The reconstructed statement does not sound absurd. Machines are suitable for repetitive and mindless tasks where they do not have control over how a task is accomplished. The semantic congruency of the reconstructed condition statement is a red flag since the lack of absurdity indicates that users are treated like machines. Our design rule is unmet and shows that the development team should consider redesigning this feature to meet ethical goals. The energy utility app redesign incorporated options for in-app reward redemption, including options to invest in sustainable energy using earned reward tokens. Thus, the condition statement for the redesign is “Users can choose how and when they redeem their loyalty tokens and can redeem them on a whim.” The reconstructed statement is, “Machines can choose how and when they redeem their loyalty tokens and can redeem them on a whim.” This statement is absurd, suggesting that the system is ethically grounded and does not require a redesign.

As described above, the reconstruction process involves the development of condition statements that are reconstructed and evaluated for absurdity. When the reconstructed condition statement is absurd, the design is considered ethically grounded. However, when the reconstructed condition statement is not absurd, a redesign may be needed to promote better ethical grounding. In such a case, the IT artifact would be redesigned and the condition statement revised. This revised condition statement can then be evaluated using reconstruction, revealing whether the redesign is more ethically grounded than the initial design. We provide condition statements for the evaluation and potential redesign of the NexoEnergy app (see Table 7) and graphically illustrate the relative ethical grounding of each design rule. A detailed description of our reconstruction process for each condition statement is available in Appendix C.

Table 7.

Conditions and relative ethical grounding for each design rule.

Design Rules	Condition Statement (Initial Design)	Changed During Redesign	Condition Statement (Redesign)
Rule 1 (Agency)	Users can set their own rules to adjust green energy consumption.	No	Users can set their own rules to adjust green energy consumption.
Rule 2 (Agency)	Users have no control over reward redemption.	Yes	Users can choose how and when they redeem their loyalty tokens and can redeem them on a whim.
Rule 3 (Rationality)	Users do not have access to individual data points for decision-making.	Yes	Users have access to individual data points for decision-making.
Rule 4 (Inclusion)	Users find the app user-friendly and intuitive.	Yes	There are variations in users’ capabilities to use the system optimally.
Rule 5 (Inclusion)	A selected user group participates in the design process.	Yes	A larger user group participates in the design process.
Rule 6 (Inclusion)	Users’ pathways to buying shares in renewable energy sources are limited and not transparent.	Yes	Users can buy shares in renewable energy sources by redeeming sustainable energy production points accumulated in the app.
Rule 7 (Dialogue)	Users express concerns and ideas directly with NexoEnergy app developers.	Yes	Users report simple feedback to a dedicated department.

Note: No Emancipatory Impact, Low Emancipatory Impact, Medium Emancipatory Impact, High Emancipatory Impact.

Discussion – EDGE impacts

EDGE can be applied to both the initial design of socio-technical systems and the continual monitoring and adaptation of existing systems. The energy utility illustration provides compelling evidence that EDGE can identify ethical issues in existing systems. For example, the initial design of NexoEnergy did not promote rationality (Design Rule 3), as the users could not access the detailed data about green energy sources that they needed to make informed decisions. The initial focus of the design team was to provide simplified and aggregated data. As part of the redesign, the design team provided access to more detailed data about the energy sources available to users. The outcome of this design change was an app that was more solidly grounded in the value of freedom to think.

The system’s redesign had a spillover effect on other design rules. For example, design rule 4—mandating inclusion based on users’ digital literacy—was affected by NexoEnergy’s redesign of data access to meet design rule 3. The redesign meant the app was a bit more complicated and less intuitive than the initial design to accommodate a higher degree of data transparency. Accessing and understanding these data required a certain level of digital literacy that not all users had. Thus, compared to the initial design, NexoEnergy’s redesign was less inclusive because a design choice that promoted freedom to think reduced freedom to belong in this illustration. This tradeoff reveals one practical limitation to achieving ethical grounding. That is, choices that ground the design in one value may downgrade the design from a competing value. This paradox of competing values demonstrates why the EDGE method is valuable. This method identifies which values are privileged and at what costs. It allows designers to make informed decisions about adherence to or departure from a pre-selected ethical kernel theory in a transparent manner.

Not only do values compete in design deliberation, but business objectives compete with ethical grounding objectives. For example, in the initial design users could express concerns and ideas directly with the developers of the app, promoting users’ freedom to express (design rule 7). However, the organization struggled to process the various forms of feedback they received from users. High coordination costs associated with filtering, digesting, and responding to high levels of direct feedback inhibited efficiency. Thus, in the redesign, the NexoEnergy team decided to communicate with users through a dedicated customer-facing department and aggregate information for developers based on user feedback. The ethical grounding and evaluation process reveals that by privileging the business needs to reduce coordination costs; developers sacrificed some grounding of the value of freedom to express. Again, this tradeoff is made visible through the systematic EDGE method, allowing the organization to confidently assess the tradeoffs they made and identify potential areas for future improvement.

An important observation is that the evaluation steps can reveal limitations in the original kernel theory, leading to the emergence of new values to be considered in subsequent grounding and evaluation steps. In our case study applying EDGE, we discovered a way in which our chosen emancipatory kernel theories fell short. That is, security is not accounted for in emancipatory theory as conceptualized by Young et al. (2021). Colloquialisms suggest that freedom and security are tradeoffs that should be considered in conjunction with one another. However, emancipatory theories in IS and the IS security theories are not well integrated. We therefore proffer IS security as an important counterbalance to freedom when the goal is true emancipation. Based on this finding, we provide an additional overarching design principle for emancipatory design, along with two corresponding context-specific design rules. These are presented in Table 8.

Table 8.

New design principle and design rules.

Design Principle	Design Rules
Design for Security	Rule 8:	Users should have access to relevant data to check that there is no greenwashing or false charge on their account.
Design for Security	Rule 9:	Users’ data should be stored securely and accurately such that it cannot be manipulated by users or other actors.

Contributions and future research directions

Socio-technical systems design is arguably the task most central to the identity of the IS field. Design science researchers excel at producing practical research solutions while reflecting on generalizable design principles (Hevner et al., 2004; Peffers et al., 2007). However, practical applicability does not guarantee grounding in values (Friedman et al., 2008). Therefore, there is a growing concern that values may be peripheralized during the design processes (De Leoz and Petter, 2018; Kane et al., 2021). Yet the problem of how designs can be grounded in values and evaluated for their social good or adverse effects persists. We proffer EDGE as a next-generation method for structuring the ethical grounding and evaluation of the socio-technical systems. This approach deviates from traditional methods to contribute to the diversifying of IS methods (Rai, 2018). While approaches, such as Value Sensitive Design (VSD), are effective when stakeholders’ values are of utmost concern; issues arise when values conflict and a limited selection of stakeholders do not result in the identification of key values. We propose EDGE as an improved approach when organizations seek to build on established, comprehensive, and well-vetted ethical frameworks.

We demonstrate the application of EDGE in the NexoEnergy case study, wherein EDGE provides the structure for rigorously comparing two competing designs. The EDGE method can be implemented multiple times over the life of an IT solution to structure researchers’ attempts to evaluate DSR artifacts in a way that is intentional, philosophically consistent, and transparent.

This research contributes to design science research literature by producing a method for developing more comprehensive overarching design rules for ethical design via the application of comprehensive ethical kernel theories. Our illustration of this method reveals a gap in existing emancipatory theories in IS literature related to the lack of emphasis on security. As Nelson Mandela said, “Freedom would be meaningless without security...” In fact, users would not trust or adopt the energy utility’s app if security were not enforced. This finding that freedoms could not be properly considered absent security considerations suggests future research should investigate the relationship between emancipation and security to better understand how best to study the tradeoffs. Empirical studies building on emancipatory theories report that efforts to promote emancipation are likely to fail without strong security provisions (e.g., Chu and Robey, 2008; Córdoba, 2009; Córdoba and Midgley, 2008). Our finding that the lack of consideration of security is a potential limitation of existing emancipatory theories suggests a possible explanation for the failure of emancipation efforts in current IS studies.

Finally, we discovered that there were times when business and practical considerations limited the extent to which practitioners could ground a system design in ethics per the kernel theory. Given the rapid and contentious trajectory of AI (Kane et al., 2021), we anticipate that business and practical considerations will increasingly conflict with ethical considerations, making EDGE more valuable than ever. This next-generation method, EDGE, guides researchers in weighing tradeoffs among ethical and practical concerns, emphasizing the importance of intentionality and transparency in design decisions. By illustrating EDGE in a business context grounded on the ethical kernel theory of emancipation, we demonstrate the applicability of our method from “ethics for social good” to “business value through ethics.” Our proposal of the EDGE approach is a starting point for IS researchers to address ethical design questions grounded in a consistent and actionable framework. We encourage researchers to apply EDGE to different application environments to demonstrate how different ethical theories can be applied to achieve ethical social impacts through information systems design.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Ethical design through grounding and evaluation (EDGE) of information systems to achieve social impacts

Supplemental Material for Ethical design through grounding and evaluation (EDGE) of information systems to achieve social impacts by Amber G Young, Syed Shuva, Tamara Roth, Yaping Zhu, and Alan R Hevner in Journal of Information Technology

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Amber G Young

Syed Shuva

Tamara Roth

Yaping Zhu

Alan R Hevner

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Author biographies

Amber G Young is an associate professor of information systems at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. Her research focuses on how information systems can promote social good and positive organizational outcomes. Amber serves as an associate editor for MIS Quarterly. Her research has appeared in MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of the AIS, Journal of Information Technology, Information Systems Journal, Information & Organization, MIT Sloan Management Review, International Journal of Information Management, AIS Transactions on Replication Research, and Communications of the Association for Information Systems.

Syed Shuva is an instructor of information systems at the Bryan School of Business and Economics at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His research focusses on the evolving nature of information consumption and their consequent societal and organizational impacts. His work has appeared in various academic journals including the Journal of Information Technology, and Communications of the Association for Information Systems, along with major information systems conferences. He holds a master’s degree in business analytics and is currently enroute to finish his PhD in Information Systems from the University of Arkansas.

Tamara Roth is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. Her research explores how emerging technologies can be leveraged to promote social good and achieve positive organizational change. She combines theories and methods from neurobiology, psychology, social sciences, and management. Tamara’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of the AIS, Journal of Information Technology, MISQ Executive, Government Information Quarterly, International Journal of Information Management, Nature Human Behavior, and Nature Machine Intelligence. She has an interdisciplinary education with master’s degrees in biology and education and PhD degrees in Educational Psychology, and in Information Systems.

Yaping Zhu is an Assistant Professor in the Information Systems & Analytics Department at the Jones College of Business, Middle Tennessee State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems and an MBA from the University of Arkansas, as well as a BA with Honors in Finance from Chongqing University. Her research focuses on the societal impacts of digital platforms and emancipatory information systems. Her work has been published in various academic journals, including the Journal of Business Research, International Journal of Information Management, and Journal of Information Technology Case and Application Research, as well as in various information systems conferences.

Alan R Hevner is Distinguished University Professor and Eminent Scholar in the School of Information Systems and Management in the Muma College of Business at the University of South Florida. He holds the Citigroup/Hidden River Chair of Distributed Technology. Dr. Hevner's areas of research interest include design science research, information systems development, software engineering, distributed database systems, healthcare systems, and Internet of Things computing. He has published over 250 research papers on these topics and has consulted for a number of Fortune 500 companies. Dr. Hevner received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University. He held faculty positions at the University of Maryland and the University of Minnesota. Dr. Hevner is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), and a Fellow of IEEE. He is a member of ACM and INFORMS. Additional honors include selection as a Parnas Fellow at Lero, the Irish software research center, a Schoeller Senior Fellow at Friedrich Alexander University in Germany, and a recipient of the Design Science Research Lifetime Achievement Award. From 2006–2009, he served as a program manager at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate.

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Ethical design through grounding and evaluation: The EDGE method for designing information systems for social impact

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Background

The EDGE approach

EDGE in practice: An ethically grounded energy customer loyalty app

Step 1: Select an ethical kernel theory

Step 2: Apply kernel theory to develop overarching, ethical design principles

Step 3: Move from overarching design principles to context-specific design rules

Step 4: Develop condition statements for each design rule

Step 5: Perform reconstruction to evaluate social impacts

Discussion – EDGE impacts

Contributions and future research directions

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Ethical design through grounding and evaluation (EDGE) of information systems to achieve social impacts

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

Supplemental Material

Author biographies

References

Supplementary Material