What society experiences today as morally questionable design—from gendered toys for children to public benches that prevent sleeping—can be considered the aftermath of an underdeveloped foundation for systematic ethical reflection in design methodologies. Although designing is an inherently moral activity, research on how to recognize and handle ethical questions and moral dilemmas in early (conceptual) design activities is scarce. In this article, we use an interdisciplinary lens to analyze and respond to the challenges of bridging moral psychology, ethics of technology, and design methodologies. For this, we introduce the concept of moral engagement in design, which is inspired by Moral Disengagement Theory. Finally, we propose five preliminary considerations for enacting moral engagement in design practices. These considerations form an interdisciplinary bridge to help us reflect on the moral dimensions of methodological choices in conceptual design practices.

We identify a dilemma currently faced by designers and design researchers concerning how best to use the influential nature of design to change people's behavior in a way that benefits society. This dilemma exists because, even though designers can create products that can exercise control over individual freedom, such products are made necessary because people seem resistant to sacrifice their freedom for the good of society. Various approaches have arisen to respond to this dilemma—ranging from the technocratic to the democratic with “libertarian paternalism” somewhere in between—but we have found that they all share a paternalistic way of treating individual freedom as a “barrier” to be overcome to achieve social goals, such as sustainability, crime reduction, public health, and social justice. Instead of tackling this issue head-on, this interdisciplinary work challenges this dilemma and, drawing from the ethics of Simone de Beauvoir, argues that freedom is not merely a value to be weighed against other values in design practices but is instead the basis of all moral values.

A potent way of designing for emotion is to design for concerns. However, people have multiple, and often, conflicting concerns. Such conflicts create emotional dilemmas: One may need to spend a Sunday afternoon working to meet a deadline, and at the same time, wish to attend a birthday party. In this paper, we consider conflicting concerns as a design opportunity: Any of the concerns can be a starting point for designing products or services that appeal to the users. However, we propose that the tension created by the conflict can be more inspiring than the involved concerns in isolation. In this paper, we present an analysis of 109 existing products through which we identify three directions these products seem to use to address users' dilemmas. These directions are resolving dilemmas, moderating dilemmas, and triggering dilemmas. We discuss the similarities and differences between these directions and their potential contribution to design fields such as designing for emotions and designing for subjective wellbeing.