ELSI in Crisis. THE BOARD GAME

This board game explores Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) of Information Technologies (IT) for the Disaster and Risk Management (DRM) domain. The game aims to support circumspect discussions of issues emerging at cross-border, cross-sector, interoperation and data management such as privacy, trust, accountability, non-discrimination, and security.

IsITethical? board game is both a tool and a process of collaboratively building worlds in which ELSI guidance can be discussed, developed further and applied in preferable near futures.

The original idea emerged from the research deliverables of the ELSI work package of SecInCoRe (2014--17), a large-scale EU funded research project concerned with IT for DRM Common Information Spaces (CIS). SecInCoRe's first prototype of the game was further developed and tested in the context of IsITethical?Exchange (2017--2019), a UK Research Innovation funded service co-design project, that explores the idea of ethical impact assessment as a creative collaborative process.

We published and presented a peer reviewed paper that offers insights from designing and playing of IsITethical? that begun as a project to make ELSI guidance accessible, but that ultimately opened the way for a much bigger journey, including an online community of practitioners, a living knowledge base, a travelling tool kit for ethical impact assessment service, a methodology to do ethics, and the developing of Ethics through Design framework, that both reformulates ideas of Ethics and ideas of Design Research using play.