Leveraging creepiness to facilitate ethical design: lessons learned from a design workshop

Developing novel technologies tends to focus on eliminating or reducing undesirable features and characteristics of novel technologies. However, there is value in exploring the impact of intentionally ‘creepy’ designs that make these unwanted characteristics an explicit attribute. We have conducted a preliminary design workshop with 10 participants to explore the impact of this approach. The results show how, in focusing on creepiness as a resource for design, participants were organically prompted to reflect on the source of creepiness, namely identifying often over looked attributes or characteristics. This facilitated the mitigation of potential side effects related to ethical issues that could emerge, as designers were informed by creepiness to create better designs of novel technologies. Overall, our work shows how creepiness could become an accessible framework to facilitate reflection on the ethical frictions of designing technologies based on users’ sense making and their relationship with interactive devices.