A Practical Framework for Ethics – the PD-Net Approach to Supporting Ethics Compliance in Public Display Studies Marc Langheinrich University of Lugano Via G. Buffi 13 Lugano, Switzerland +41 (59) 666-4304 langheinrich@acm.org Albrecht Schmidt University of Stuttgart Pfaffenwaldring 5a Stuttgart, Germany +49 (711) 685-60048 albrecht.schmidt@acm.org Nigel Davies Lancaster University Comp. Dept., InfoLab 21 Lancaster, England +44 (1524) 510327 nigel@comp.lancs.ac.uk Rui José Universidade do Minho Campus de Azurem, Guimaraes, Portugal +351 (253) 510-307 rui@dsi.uminho.pt ABSTRACT Research involving public displays often faces the need to study the effects of a deployment in the wild. While many organizations have institutionalized processes for ensuring ethical compliance of such human subject experiments, these may fail to stimulate sufficient awareness for ethical issues among all project members. Some organizations even require such assessments only for medical research, leaving computer scientists without any incentive to consider and reflect on their study design and data collection practices. Faced with similar problems in the context of the EU-funded PD-Net project, we have implemented a step-by- step ethics process that aims at providing structured yet light- weight guidance to all project members, both stimulating the design of ethical user studies, as well as providing continuous documentation. This paper describes our process and reports on 3 years of experience using it. All materials are publicly available and we hope that other projects in the area of public displays, and beyond, will adopt them to suit their particular needs. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.4.1 [Computers and Society]: Public Policy IssuesEthics, Privacy; H5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User InterfacesEvaluation/methodology; K6.1 [Management of Computing and Information Systems]: Project and People ManagementManagement techniques; K7.4 [The Computing Profession]: Professional EthicsCodes of good practice; General Terms Documentation; Experimentation; Legal Aspects; Management Keywords Data protection; Ethical awareness; Human subject experiments; In-the-wild studies; Public displays 1. INTRODUCTION Research in many aspects of mobile and ubiquitous computing is increasingly multi-disciplinary, multi-site and involves ethnographic observations and numerous user studies. Pervasive display research is perhaps the canonical example: project teams often consist of computer scientists, designers, architects and social scientists and experiments tend to include both lab-based studies and extensive field work [1]. Of course, these characteristics don’t just relate to pervasive display research – many areas such as usable security, smart homes, behavior change applications and citizen science share common traits. One of the significant challenges in conducting this type of research is in gaining appropriate ethical approval. For some, ethics is at the very heart of their discipline [2][3] – for others it has become an administrative hoop that one has jump through [4]. The situation also varies significantly by country: in the US and the UK for example there are well established ethics procedures for human subject research and institutional review boards (IRBs) providing a well-defined process and oversight. These procedures typically require researchers to submit detailed descriptions of planned studies before permission to conduct the experiment is granted. However, not all institutions have such procedures – especially in many parts of Europe where gaining ethical approval is often not required unless the research is in the medical domain. A formal ethics process involving IRB review also suffers from a shortcoming in that it is typically only conducted once at the start of the project. This raises two significant challenges. Firstly, in computer science driven projects the focus often changes during the course of the research due to the availability of new technologies. More critically, the IRB process often involves just the PIs of projects as the students and researchers are not in place at the outset. Finally, we note that it is also the case that ethical approval is just one consideration in experimental design. In particular, additional approval may be required for data storage and data retention in order to comply with data protection legislation and privacy regulations. As part of the PD-Net pervasive display project [5] the authors, all PIs at their respective institutions, have had to face these problems of experimental design and ethical compliance. We have created a project-wide ethical approval process in order to better address ethics issues throughout the project lifetime. This process does not replace existing local ethics procedures – rather it looks to introduce a framework that supplements these in the context of the project and involves all project participants. The approach described in this paper has been successfully applied and extended by different researchers over the last three years. In addition to the ethical dimension, the process introduced has (subjectively) strengthened the reflection of researchers on the research questions before and during the design and execution of studies. This paper describes the design principles, the process, and our experiences of creating and using this framework. We hope that the framework is useful to others pursuing research in the area of pervasive displays and, more generally, in the areas of mobile and ubiquitous computing. The detailed process description and the related documentation are published and available to other researchers (cf. section 6). Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. PerDis '13, June 04 - 05 2013, Mountain View, CA, USA Copyright 2013 ACM 978-1-4503-2096-2/13/06…$15.00.