About the Ethical Design Guide

Tech is all around us, developing fast, and not going away. Which is why ethics should be a part of the design and engineering curriculum, and a focus for everyone working in the industry.

Without it, we risk creating products that cause harm, often against people from minoritized groups, who already face a lot of injustice. Think of the predictive policing software that’s biased against Black people, products that reinforce gender stereotypes or exclude non-binary folks, or all the websites that are not accessible.

Ethical Design Guide is made to share resources on how to create ethical products that don't cause harm. More links will be added continuously. Subscribe to the mailing list to receive a monthly update on new resources and interesting new reads.

Bugs, improvements, and feature requests

If you find any bugs or have feature requests, you can open an issue on GitHub, and use one of the following labels in the title:

  • [a11y]: Accessibility bugs and improvements
  • [Bug]: Something doesn’t seem to be working
  • [Feature]: Requests and suggestions for new features
  • [Improvement]: General design and code improvements

There's only one person working on this project, so more functionality will be added gradually, and accessibility improvements will be prioritized. The following issues are already on the roadmap:

  • Improving the list design
  • Improving recommended filters
  • Adding dark mode

Future additions may also include our own blog posts, guides and checklists.

If you see a resource that shouldn’t be here or want to add one of your own, it's preferred to create a pull request with the change instead. More information on that can be found in the submission guidelines.

About the creator

Sarah Fossheim (@sarahfossheim) is a multidisciplinary developer and designer focused on creating inclusive and accessible products. They created Ethical Design Guide in December 2020, with the goal of making it easier to create more ethical products.

It originally started with a Notion document in June 2020, but was moved over to its own self-hosted platform in fall. This allows others to submit resources in a supervised way without allowing trolls to misuse the functionality, by creating a pull request on GitHub.