Send message to Authors

Short abstract:

Smart home devices impact home's ethical norms but developers may lack methods and experience to consider ethics during innovation. We develop a collaborative, transdisciplinary methodology to embed upstream ethical reflection in industry contexts that may have value beyond the smart home milieu.

Long abstract:

Smart home devices have become a popular new technology and include smart TVs, kitchen appliances, lighting systems and security cameras. However, these devices have generated significant concerns about privacy and related ethical issues such as autonomy and respect (Lund, 2014; Lau et al, 2018). To prevent such ethical harms, developers are encouraged to perform upstream reflection. Some smart home researchers have used sociological research to produce normative data on the experiences of living with smart home devices (Kraemer & Flechais, 2018; Chalhoub et al, 2021). Yet most smart home device development occurs in industry contexts by technology developers who may not be familiar with or have the expertise to conduct ethical reflection. In response, we draw on the established ‘N-Reasons’ applied ethics survey tool (Danielson, 2013) and further develop it as a transdisciplinary and collaborative methodology capable for use in an industrial context. We map our co-development of this tool in collaboration with industry practitioners to assess ethically complex human and human-robot-interaction scenarios. We show how the tool helps to identify which home privacy norms are affected by smartness, and how smart device perceptions are socially generated by users and non-users. We demonstrate that the tool offers a novel transdisciplinary approach for embedding ethical reflection upstream in industry contexts that may have value beyond the smart home device milieu.