Responsible Design: Care Ethics for AI-Enabled Systems

Editors

• Fernando Miramontes Forattini, Dublin City University
• Regina Connolly, Dublin City University

Description

This special issue examines how care ethics and relational approaches can advance responsible design and governance of AI-enabled systems. While contemporary AI ethics discourse has focused on fairness, transparency, and compliance frameworks, this call seeks to address the structural, relational, and institutional dimensions of how digital systems affect vulnerability, participation, and human agency.

The special issue invites empirical research, conceptual contributions, design science research, and interdisciplinary perspectives that move beyond procedural approaches to explore responsibility distribution across socio-technical arrangements. Submissions should examine relationships between technology, power, participation, exclusion, and accountability in digital environments, grounded in diverse epistemological and methodological traditions.

Potential topics

• Care ethics and Information Systems design
• Responsible AI and relational accountability
• Ethics of participation, inclusion, and exclusion in digital systems
• Structural ethics and socio-technical governance
• Human-centred and care-centred AI design
• Vulnerability, dependency, and digital infrastructures
• AI governance and institutional legitimacy
• Ethics of repair, maintenance, and redress in digital systems
• Participatory and inclusive approaches to AI governance
• Responsible innovation and structurally aware design
• Public sector AI and questions of care, trust, and legitimacy
• Algorithmic systems and the distribution of risk and burden
• Gender, inequality, and digital governance
• Ethics of automated decision-making
• Relational approaches to trust, transparency, and accountability
• Organizational responsibility in AI-enabled environments
• Care ethics and sustainability in digital transformation