Information Technology Reference
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Certainly it gives people the opportunity to define the problem in their own terms. But you may
quickly discover that it comes up short. Perhaps the greatest problem is that people have concepts
about many aspects of the topic on which they cannot directly reflect. Rather, you will usually be
better served by employing an alternative approach. As is common in social cognitive research—
see Kahn (1999, Chapter 5) for a discussion of methods—you could interview people about a
hypothetical situation, or a common everyday event in their lives, or a task that you have asked
them to solve, or a behavior in which they have just engaged. But, no matter what you choose, the
important point is a priori to conceptualize what the topic entails, if possible demarcating its
boundaries through formal criteria, and at a minimum employing issues or tasks that engage
people's reasoning about the topic under investigation.
Heuristics for Technical Investigations
When engaging in value-oriented technical investigations, the following heuristics can prove useful:
Technical mechanisms will often adjudicate multiple if not conflicting values, often in the
form of design trade-offs. We have found it helpful to make explicit how a design trade-off maps
onto a value conflict and differentially affects different groups of stakeholders. For example, the
Room with a View study suggests real-time displays in interior offices may provide physiological
benefits for those in the inside offices (the direct stakeholders), yet may impinge on the privacy
and security of those walking through the outdoor scene (the indirect stakeholders), especially
women.
Unanticipated values and value conflicts often emerge after a system is developed and
deployed. Thus, when possible, design flexibility into the underlying technical architecture so
that it can be responsive to such emergent concerns. In UrbanSim, for example, Borning et al.
used agile programming techniques to design an architecture that can more readily accommodate
new indicators and models.
The control of information flow through underlying protocols—and the privacy concerns sur-
rounding such control—is a strongly contested area. Ubiquitous computing, with sensors that col-
lect and then disseminate information at large, has only intensified these concerns. We suggest
that underlying protocols that release information should be able to be turned off (and in such a
way that the stakeholders are confident they have been turned off).
CONCLUSION
There is a growing interest and challenge to address values in design. Our goal in this paper has
been to provide enough detail about Value Sensitive Design so that other researchers and design-
ers can critically examine, use, and extend this approach. Our hope is that this approach can con-
tribute to a principled and comprehensive consideration of values in the design of information and
computational systems.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Value Sensitive Design has emerged over the past decade and benefited from discussions with
many people. We would like particularly to acknowledge all the members of our respective
research groups, along with Edward Felten, Jonathan Grudin, Sara Kiesler, Clifford Nass, Helen
Nissenbaum, John Thomas, and Terry Winograd. This research was supported in part by NSF
Awards IIS-9911185, IIS-0325035, EIA-0121326, and EIA-0090832.
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