Driving organisational change around design ethics

Contents

Introduction

How I helped the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) make design ethics practical and expected, over six years of persistent, patient work. This is government, which doesn’t exactly move quickly on these kinds of matters.

Organisation:
Ministry of Justice
Sector:
Public
Timeframe:
2021 to present
My role:
Project lead, subject matter expert, UX Designer
Responsibilities:
Defining the approach, delivering talks, running the X-GOV community, designing and iterating the ethics review, writing guidance, lobbying GDS and MOJ service standards teams

Goal

  1. Make ethics understandable and non-intimidating.
  2. Create a tool that teams could actually use.
  3. Build a governance process to drive take-up, because no one voluntarily does extra work that nobody is asking for.

Starting the conversation

In 2021, The Social Dilemma had just come out and design and tech ethics was becoming a hot topic. Inside government, though, the GOV.UK Service Standard made no explicit mention of ethics and offered little robust guidance to support it. I’m a philosophy nerd and was already writing a philosophy blog in my spare time, so I got together with a few colleagues who felt the same way. We believed the Service Standard needed more robust guidance and an explicit mention of ethics.

We quickly realised the gap was bigger than missing guidance. Many people didn’t really know what ethics is, let alone what design ethics means in practice, and the topic felt intimidating. Even people who cared had no obvious way to act on it. Before we could build anything, I needed to make ethics approachable.

I started by writing about it, and did some work to draw the boundary between good design and ethical design, so people could see what ethics adds rather than assuming it was just another word for good practice.

  • Good design vs ethical design

    I have recently been doing work on design ethics at the Ministry of Justice for the Office of the Public Guardian. I’m currently exploring what…

  • Ethics in design: What is ethics?

    In recent times, ethics has become something of a buzzword in the tech industry, and for a good reason. Bad design decisions can lead to devastat…

I then gave a number of talks across MOJ to start educating people and to make ethics a normal part of the conversation.

Building a community

Ethics work can feel lonely, and I knew other government departments were wrestling with the same questions. I started X-GOV, a monthly cross-government event where we invited guest speakers and discussed the approaches that different departments were experimenting with. It gave people a place to share what was working, compare notes and borrow from each other, and it gave the work a wider footing than a single department.

Creating a tool

Talks and articles build awareness, but teams also needed something practical to do. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we looked at what was already out there and found a workshop that Spotify had created. We amended the content to make it more applicable to MOJ and named it the “ethics review”.

We tested it with a handful of teams, watched where people struggled, and iterated to make it easier to use. That gave us a tool that worked. It also exposed a new problem: who was going to voluntarily do extra work that no one was asking for? To drive take-up, we needed some form of governance around it.

Making the case for a standard

I decided this guidance belonged in the GOV.UK Service Manual and should be included in the Service Standard, either as a new point or incorporated into the existing 14. That would make ethics part of how every government service is assessed, rather than a nice-to-have.

I met with the Government Digital Service (GDS) on a number of occasions to push for adoption. They were supportive but lacked the resources to take it on at the time. Their advice was to trial it in MOJ as an experiment and come back once we had some learnings. It wasn’t the answer I’d hoped for, but it gave us a clear route forward.

Trialling it in MOJ

To follow that advice, I assembled a team to create user-friendly guidance and an MOJ service standard for ethics. We published the guidance on the MOJ design system so teams could find it and use it.

As more teams ran the ethics review, I collated further research and used it to redesign the format. Sessions could now be tailored to different teams, so they could focus on what was relevant to them and save time on what wasn’t. This made the review easier to justify to busy teams.

Embedding it

Around the same time, the MOJ service standards team was working on standards for sustainability and business readiness, and looking for somewhere to publish them. I made the case that our ethics guidance should be part and parcel of this work, with everything sitting together on the same guidance site. That placed ethics alongside other standards teams already had to meet, rather than leaving it as a separate initiative.

I also pushed for the guidance to be open and accessible to people outside MOJ, because this was cutting-edge work and other organisations could learn from it and build on it.

Outcomes

Over six years, MOJ has become a more ethically aware and mature organisation. The ethics review has helped people think more thoroughly about inclusion, risks to individual safety, psychological harms and societal consequences. The ethics guidance has made design and tech ethics more intelligible and actionable.

Most significantly, the ethics service standard will become a mandatory part of service assessments from January 2027.

Reflection

Culture change in government is slow, but it responds to persistence, practical tools and the right governance hooks. Making ethics approachable got people interested, and making it a standard made it stick.