Ethical impact assessment / Ethics-by-design​

During the development and deployment of a new project, service or product, it is essential to consider potential ethical issues that may arise to ensure successful and sustainable outputs. Ethical Impact Assessments (EIA) are a methodology for assessing the potential ethical impacts of an initiative and identifying how to avoid or minimise these negative impacts.

Similarly, ethics-by-design is an approach to design that builds in ethical protection at the early stages of developing a product or service.

Together, these approaches aim to identify potential ethical issues and prioritise ethics throughout the design and development process to build superior technologies and services that better support human flourishing and avoid negative impacts and unwanted consequences.

Trilateral’s approach to ethical impact assessments stems from our extensive experience in privacy impact assessments. We have deployed and refined these approaches in our research and development projects and are leading the development of new approaches to ethical impact assessment and ethics-by-design that integrate with commonly used software development approaches, such as Agile.

Trilateral Research has a wealth of interdisciplinary experts with extensive experience conducting privacy and ethics impact assessments. Our multidisciplinary team, comprised of social scientists, data scientists, data protection officers, legal experts, understands technology and ethics, and more importantly, how they come together.