"That's dastardly ingenious"

Abstract

Scholars have previously described how online communities engage in particular discourses and forms of argumentation. In parallel, HCI and STS researchers have described discourses surrounding ethics and values and their role in shaping design processes and outcomes. However, little work has addressed the intersection of ethical concern and the discourses of non-expert users. In this paper, we describe the argumentation strategies used by Redditors on the subreddit 'r/assholedesign' as they discuss ethically problematic design artifacts. We used content and sequence analysis methods to identify the building blocks of ethical argumentation in this online community, including ethical positioning when raising issues of concern, identification of potential remedies to the original design artifact or issues of concern, and means of extending or negating these elements. Through this analysis, we reveal the breadth of ethical argumentation strategies used "in-the-wild" by non-experts, resulting in an increased awareness of the capacity of community members to engage in "everyday ethics" regardless of specific ethics training. We describe future opportunities to connect these ethical argumentation strategies with design practices, education, and methods.