Raphaelle de Beaumont

Before going to RCA, I completed a BSc in Business Management at London School of Economics, and started my career in e-commerce and strategy consulting.

I joined the Service Design program because I wanted to 'practice' design thinking tools and apply them from beginning to the end of a project. The course has given me the skills to think creatively about social issues such as financial abuse or the future of work for market traders. I enjoyed collaborating with partners such as Ernst & Young, Rainbird AI, Boston Consulting Group and Fuzzy studio.

I now consider myself as a creative problem solver with two ‘hats’ and hope to join a team where I can help businesses make a more mindful and meaningful use of new technologies.

For my final project, I worked with Celina Thomsen (Service Design) in partnership with the Danish Design Centre, to help tech start-ups to think more ethically about their digital product or service.

Tackling the theme of digital ethics was ambitious, and it taught me a lot in terms of crafting convincing narratives to embark busy stakeholders. It also pushed me to think more critically about how new technologies are being developed.

Finally, I was able to apply the service design tools I have learnt over these two years and work with an incredibly talented colleague and friend.

Introduction to the project — Although various open-source ethics tools exist online, none of them gets the attention and uses they deserve. Ethics is either perceived strictly regarding the law; it's too subjective and/or too intangible. Watch the video to understand the project background and initial insights of approaching start-ups about digital ethics.

The Service — F*** Ethics is a program within incubators where start-ups learn to consider and act upon the ethical implications of their digital products or services. Through an introduction to digital ethics, discussion prompts and a Digital Ethics Sprint, start-up teams are pushed to see the blindspots of their solution. They then create an action plan for a chosen ethical risk or dilemma.

Putting Digital Ethics in the Face of Start ups — We prototyped provocative discussion question prompts such as ‘Say Trump took control of your product, what would he try to do with it?’. We printed these on cards and beers and sent them to start-ups. It resulted in the creation of the Devil’s Advocate cards set, sold through the F*** Ethics truck that we drive to incubators’ HQ as an awareness touchpoint.

Making it Practical — We created a one-hour workshop called Digital Ethics Sprint that has been tested among three start-ups. In the workshop, founders and their product teams write a review of their digital product through the eyes of one of their stakeholders. Then, start-ups map the dilemmas and risks they found, before creating an action plan for a chosen risk and presenting it to the rest of the cohort. Watch the video of Mads, a graduate of the program, to know more!

Bringing F*** Ethics to Life — We will be piloting a compressed version of the program with Innofounder Graduate, an incubator based in Copenhagen. We will roll out further by leveraging resources from the Danish Design Centre and Innovation Fund Denmark. In the future we see F*** Ethics becoming an independent training company dedicated to tech start-ups, with interventions funded by incubators and accelerators.

Brief

Insecure data handling, biased automation, deceptive interfaces... Tech companies have been going under increasing media scrutiny for having negative impact on humans. What if we could give them tools at the beginning of their product development process in order to prevent such unethical consequences?

Working alongside the Danish Design Centre based in Copenhagen, Celina and I took on the challenge of making digital ethics a common practice in the tech start-up community. We wished to contribute to build more respectful technologies and make ethical design a competitive advantage in Europe's tech industry.

Browse the above modules to know more and do not hesitate to contact us for a full presentation! A special thanks to the Digital Ethics Compass team at the Danish Design Centre and to our tutor Jane Pritchard.

Medium:

Video, digital mockups, presentation

In Collaboration with:

Celina Thomsen

Raphaelle de Beaumont

Medium:

In Collaboration with:

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Royal College of Art