VALUE SENSITIVE DESIGN AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS - Human-Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems: Foundations - page 333

harm. The third involves whether or not harms that do occur lie outside the parameters of the trust
relationship. From such conceptualizations, Friedman et al. were able to define clearly what they
meant by trust online. This definition is in some cases different from what other researchers have
meant by the term—for example, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, in their
thoughtful publication Trust in Cyberspace (Schneider, 1999), adopted the terms “trust” and
“trustworthy” to describe systems that perform as expected along the dimensions of correctness,
security, reliability, safety, and survivability. Such a definition, which equates “trust” with expec-
tations for machine performance, differs markedly from one that says trust is fundamentally a
relationship among people (sometimes mediated by machines).
Empirical Investigations
Conceptual investigations can only go so far. Depending on the questions at hand, many analyses
will need to be informed by empirical investigations of the human context in which the technical
artifact is situated. Empirical investigations are also often needed to evaluate the success of a par-
ticular design. Empirical investigations can be applied to any human activity that can be observed,
measured, or documented. Thus, the entire range of quantitative and qualitative methods used in
social science research is potentially applicable here, including observations, interviews, surveys,
experimental manipulations, collection of relevant documents, and measurements of user behav-
ior and human physiology.
Empirical investigations can focus, for example, on questions such as: How do stakeholders
apprehend individual values in the interactive context? How do they prioritize competing values
in design trade-offs? How do they prioritize individual values and usability considerations? Are
there differences between espoused practice (what people say) compared with actual practice
(what people do)? Moreover, because the development of new technologies affects groups as well
as individuals, questions emerge about how organizations appropriate value considerations in the
design process. For example, regarding value considerations, what are organizations' motivations,
methods of training and dissemination, reward structures, and economic incentives?
Technical Investigations
As discussed in “Value Sensitive Design's Constellation of Features,” later in this chapter, Value
Sensitive Design adopts the position that technologies in general, and information and computer
technologies in particular, provide value suitabilities that follow from properties of the technol-
ogy. That is, a given technology is more suitable for certain activities and more readily supports
certain values while rendering other activities and values more difficult to realize.
In one form, technical investigations focus on how existing technological properties and
underlying mechanisms support or hinder human values. For example, some video-based collab-
orative work systems provide blurred views of office settings, while other systems provide clear
images that reveal detailed information about who is present and what they are doing. Thus the
two designs differentially adjudicate the value trade-off between an individual's privacy and the
group's awareness of individual members' presence and activities.
In the second form, technical investigations involve the proactive design of systems to support
values identified in the conceptual investigation. For example, Fuchs (1999) developed a notifi-
cation service for a collaborative work system in which the underlying technical mechanisms
implement a value hierarchy whereby an individual's desire for privacy overrides other group
members' desires for awareness.