About

The Design Bioethics Lab are particularly interested in radical moral disagreements: situations where people disagree deeply about what matters, what is right, or what we owe one another. These disagreements are often not resolved by having more information. To understand them, we need to look at how people’s values, experiences, and assumptions shape the way they see a problem and how those perspectives interact when people have to make decisions together.

Our approach is design bioethics.

Design bioethics brings together bioethics, empirical research, and human-centred design to create purpose-built ways of investigating ethical questions. We design research tools to reflect the questions and ideas we are trying to investigate.

This might mean designing a game, an interactive digital experience, a conversational system, or another kind of research tool. These tools can put people in situations where they have to make choices, encounter different perspectives, and engage with ethical questions in ways that are difficult to capture through conventional surveys or interviews alone.

Our projects use this approach to explore questions about health, wellbeing, technology, and the future. We are especially interested in bringing young people into these debates and in creating research that includes perspectives that are often missing from bioethics.

Ultimately, we want to understand not only what people think but how values are formed, how disagreements develop, and what might help us make better decisions together.

We do not assume that every disagreement can or should end in consensus. Sometimes the goal is to find between ways of living with difference, making decisions despite disagreement, and understanding what we owe one another across generations.