  As Digital Transformation and innovation driven by Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) continue to mark the evolution of society,
ethics emerges as a central concern not only in terms of the outcomes and
implications of technological systems but also throughout the activities
carried out through the development of those systems. Power dynamics have been
identified as a recurrent ethical challenge in the design and development
process. As designers, participants, and project stakeholders engage in the
process, potential conflicts, power imbalances, and ethical challenges emerge.
This requires that awareness is raised on these imbalances and that teams
proactively act on them. To address this issue, we propose the
Participant-Designer Journey Map (PDJM), a tool to assist designers in
conducting an ethical design process, aware of power imbalances. The proposal
for the PDJM was evaluated, based on a set of criteria derived from the
literature, by three design professionals, against nine other alternative
tools. The PDJM was identified as the tool with the most potential to
facilitate a structured approach to navigating ethical dilemmas, particularly
those related to power dynamics.
