The Ethical Stack

The Ethical Stackis a toolkit designed to help tech teams reflect on ethical and social impacts throughout the design and development process. Developed as part of the VIRT-EU academic research initiative, the project aimed to integrate practical ethics into product workflows without slowing them down.

It was deployed and tested acrossCopenhagen, Amsterdam, and Londonthrough dozens of hands-on workshops with real teams. The toolkit includes printable card decks, worksheets, facilitation guides, and a lightweight digital prototype centred around one core idea: ethical reasoning can (and should) be part of fast-paced design processes.

Across the connected tech industry, conversations about ethics often remain theoretical or after the fact. Our team recognized a need for tools that embed reflection into product development in atimely, tangible, and team-basedway. The Ethical Stack was conceived as astructured intervention something any startup or innovation team could pick up and use together.

Workshops with IoT teams revealed a consistent challenge: ethical concerns often surfaced too late. Our goal was to shift that timing forward to the moments when product direction was still fluid.

I led thedesign and development of the tool’s user experience, working closely with researchers and domain experts. My contributions included:

Translating ethical theory into clear, actionable steps.

Designing the UX flow of the toolkit’s three-phase journey.

Wireframing and prototyping low-fi digital modules and printable artefacts.

Testing tools live with teams and iterating based on feedback.

The collaboration involved regular sprints with ethicists, social scientists, and CIID designers. Each sprint began with theory and ended with a tested prototype. I owned the design logic and interaction patterns across physical and digital formats.

We worked withtight timelines and modest funding and often juggled betweenremote and in-person workshops. COVID disruptions forced us to pivot our facilitation methods for hybrid teams.

Some key challenges:

Attention Span: We assumed teams could dedicate half a day it turns out 1–2 hour blocks were more realistic.

Remote Access: Offline-first materials became critical when travel stopped.

Prototype Depth: A full app was out of scope but we needed enough interactivity to guide teams.

These constraints led us to focus onpaper-digital hybrids: printable cards, flexible flows, and minimal tooling friction.

Our process combined:

Ethical theory reviews(virtue ethics, care ethics, capabilities approach)

Founder interviewsand observations of startup team habits

Role-play testingwith design students and early-stage tech teams

We also studied analogues like serious games, bowtie risk tools, and speculative design workshops. A key insight:simple visuals and physical engagementoutperformed text-heavy forms or abstract prompts.

The toolkit revolves around athree-phase flow:

Create & Share

Map your product’s elements across a layered “stack” (Device, Data, Context, Team, 3rd Parties) see 📷 ethical_01.

Connect & Question

Receive value-driven challenges (Responsibility, Autonomy, Transparency, etc.) related to your stack see 📷 ethical_02 and 📷 ethical_07.

Consider & Re-think

Discuss tensions and brainstorm adjustments then feed them into your design see 📷 ethical_08.

These flexible and time-box phases enable teams to engage deeplywithout overwhelming cognitive load.

We emphasized low-fidelity formats withvisual metaphors, like a “bowtie” layout for impact mapping and branching futures 📷 ethical_04 and an estimated timeline diagram for facilitators 📷 ethical_05.

While primarily physical, we created aFigma-based web prototypeand minimal JavaScript tooling to support digital interaction 📷 ethical_03. Key tools included:

Figmais for interface layout and team feedback.

Miro for remote facilitation during COVID.

Print-and-fold cards easily iterated and deployed.

We also designed iconography for each tool phase 📷 ethical_06, 📷 ethical_07, 📷 ethical_08 to keep the system visually consistent and intuitive.

We worked insprints across cities, each including:

Research or insight-gathering

Tool refinement and layout

Workshop testing and team feedback

We added aremote facilitation guideduring the pandemic to ensure usability even in virtual settings. We also shortened modules after noticing that overly long sessions killed team energy.

Our most significant pivot: replacing an early 90-question ethics questionnaire with a set of concise, visually organized card decks. Teams reported that long forms drained discussion energy. The shift tomodular, tactile formatsmade the sessions more playful and collaborative.

We also added timing guides and phase-specific icons to support non-expert facilitators in running sessions smoothly.

We shipped abox-format toolkit, including:

3 phase-specific card decks

Worksheets for mapping, impact, and revision

Facilitation guides

A lightweight digital prototype

The toolkit was tested and praised by:

Over adozen early-stage startups

Multipleuniversity courses

Cross-functional teams inCopenhagen, Amsterdam, and London

Feedback highlighted its ability toturn abstract ethical concerns into concrete, actionable dialogue. Teams reported more alignment, better tension surfacing, and a stronger shared vocabulary around ethics.

I’m proud of how weoperationalized academic ethics theory into real-world design tools. The biggest challenge was balancing depth with usability but the toolkit now strikes a solid balance.

I also grew significantly in:

Translating theory into UX flows

Designing for hybrid (print + digital) environments

Facilitating meaningful discussion in interdisciplinary groups

If I could do it again, I’d integrate lightweight analytics from the start and accelerate the path toward a more robust digital app companion.