Ethics in Action: Envisioning Human Values in the Early Stages of Drone Development

This work introduces a case-study of a European Union-funded drone research project where an attempt was made to put ethics into action. Value sensitive design envisioning cards were used to identify relevant ethical considerations in the project via a workshop early in the development process. These included: stakeholder, human values, pervasiveness, time, and multi-lifespan considerations. It was found that the engineering experts in the workshop were engaged and willing to be critical of their own technology. Several ethics recommendations and approaches were given to improve the project, including capability caution, explicability, meaningful human control, meaningful human work, design for calmness, stakeholder input methods, design for end-of-life, and privacy by design. A short envisioning workshop is not sufficient to address all ethical challenges, so the final impact on the design of the drone system remains to be seen. Still, we hope that this work contributes in some way to bridging the engineering-ethics and research-practice gaps.