The Ethics of Drone Design: How Value Sensitive Design Can Create
Better Technologies
Abstract
Drones are being designed and used for an increasing number of applications, from wildlife ecology, to healthcare, to security and defense. But what human values do these technologies support? Do they enhance welfare, privacy, safety, trust, environmental sustainability, social justice? If not, how do we design them differently – how do we make better technologies? This talk presents value sensitive design - an ethically-informed approach to technological development – and shows how it has been used to create drones that benefit society. Rather than being “armchair philosophy”, this applied ethics methodology leads to practical design solutions and assists in the translation of abstract human values into concrete design requirements. The speaker will showcase several drones developed using value sensitive design - for wildlife monitoring in Kenya, transportation of urgent medical samples in Denmark, and education in Sierra Leone. The talk will conclude with a multitude of recommendations for making ethically-informed drones in the future. The ethics of drone design should be relevant to everyone in the drone industry, and especially for scholars, engineers, companies, governments, and citizens alike.
Short Biography
Dylan Cawthorne is an Associate Professor at the Drone Center at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. He tries to make the world a better place using ethics, technology, and art. Dylan is an interdisciplinary researcher, champion for the use of ethics and human values in engineering, and an activist engineer. His main area of research is using value sensitive design methods and ethical principles to design and build prototype drones. He recently published the first book on the value sensitive design of drones: 'The Ethics of Drone Design'.
