Is your product causing harm you haven't accounted for?
A rescheduled event — originally postponed due to the civil unrest in Belfast last summer.
We're glad to finally be bringing this one to life.
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AI is accelerating product development at an unprecedented pace — but our ability to anticipate the ethical consequences hasn't kept up.
For product teams, good intentions are no longer enough. Regulatory scrutiny around responsible technology is intensifying, reputational risk from harmful products is growing, and the cost of identifying ethical failures post-launch far outweighs addressing them early. Ethical design isn't a values exercise — it's a risk management discipline.
This session is about putting that into practice.
Working in small groups, you'll apply a real ethical design tool to a real product — surfacing harm, unintended consequences, and blind spots that traditional product processes miss.
Tools include Spotify's own Ethics Assessment, the Black Mirror Brainstorm, Provocatype, Dichotomy Mapping, and more. Each table works with a different tool and a different product, before the room comes together to compare findings.
What you'll take away:
- Networking, drinks and food
- A sharp introduction to why ethical design tools exist — and why most product teams still aren't using them
- 30 minutes of hands-on group work applying a structured tool to a real product scenario
- A full-room debrief surfacing themes and risk patterns across all six tools
- A practical framework for choosing the right tool at the right stage of your product lifecycle
No prior knowledge of ethics or ethical design required. These tools are built to be picked up without specialist training — you'll leave knowing whether that's actually true.
Come ready to ask the questions nobody on your team has thought to ask yet.
