Having a Positive Impact with Design Science Research – Learning from Effective Altruism

How to increase the chances of overall positive, rather than negative, impacts from new technology developments is expected to be a key challenge for the future of design-oriented research. In this context, we argue that a thorough understanding of the ethical dimension of research and technology is needed so that researchers can make an informed assessment of the expected impact of their work and carry it out more effectively. Myers and Venable [1] took a first step towards investigating the role of ethics in design science research (DSR) and proposed a tentative set of principles that aim to help researchers achieve outcomes that are good from an ethical perspective. We extend this stream of research and present an ethics-aware DSR framework, which describes how values and ethics are fundamentally related to DSR and how we measure its impact. Most importantly, the framework can act as an actionable guideline for how to maximize the expected positive impact of DSR projects. Moreover, the framework can also be used to discuss the structure, direction and expected positive impact of DSR.