Value Sensitive Design: Four Challenges

Ibo van de Poel

Associate professor Delft University of Technology

Fellow-in-residence Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies

May 16, 2010

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What is value-sensitive design (VSD)?

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• Systematic attempt to include values of ethical importance in design

• Three types of investigations:

• Empirical

• Conceptual

• Technical/engineering

Why VSD?

• Design is about changing the world

• Inherently normative

• Designers have being doing it all the time

• But make more explicit, transparent and systematic

• Improve design

• Include values that have not been commonly included so far

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Four challenges for VSD

• What values to include in design?

• How to make these values bear on the design process?

• How to make choices and tradeoffs between conflicting values?

• How to verify whether the designed system embodies the intended values?

The challenges

• Seem practical in nature

• But each of them is related to a deeper underlying philosophical problem

• My aim:

• clarify problems and show ways for dealing with them or even avoiding them.

• No clear-cut methodology for engineers

Philosophical issues

• What values to include in design?

• What are values? Are they objective or subjective?

• How to make these values bear on the design process?

• How to bridge the gap between world of ideas and world of things?

• How to make choices and tradeoffs between conflicting values?

• Do incommensurable values preclude optimizing?

• How to verify whether the designed system embodies the intended values?

• Can technology embody values?

1st challenge

Sources of values in design:

• Design brief (motivation of project)

• Designers (and their professional community)

• Users and stakeholders

• Codes of ethics, codes & standards, law, society

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What values to include?

• This is a normative question

• Sources provide first approximation, but how to decide:

• What values are worth including and which ones not?

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Correspondence between values and reasons

V: If x is valuable or is a value one has reasons for a positive response (a pro-attitude or a pro-behavior) towards x

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Possible positive responses

• Increase

• Maximize

• Respect

• Protect

• Admire

• Enjoy

• What response is appropriate will usually depend on value and the context

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Examples of some appropriate responses in design

• Safety

• Respect safety margins

• Maximize overall safety

• Democracy

• Involve stakeholders in the design process

• Design criteria for democratic technologies (Sclove)

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What values to include in design?

• (v) is helpful

• To distinguish ‘real’ values from ‘mere’ values

• To determine appropriate response

• But:

• Requires judgment

• Room for (rational) discussion and disagreement

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2nd challenge

• How to make values bear on the design process?

• Might require closing gap between humanities/social sciences (value inquiries) and engineering/sciences

• Now: focus on translation of values into design requirements

Design requirements

• Desirable characteristics of the designed system

• Usually formulated at start of design process but may be reformulated during design

• Set is often incomplete and potentially conflicting

• Hierarchically structured

Values hierarchy

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Example of values hierarchy

Constructing a values hierarchy

• Can be done top-down and bottom-up

• Usually combination and iterative process

• Top-down: specification

• Bottom-up: for the sake of

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Specification

• Non-deductive

• Context-dependent

• Adds information

• Scope of norm

• Specification of goals

• Specification of means

• Adequacy: does meeting lower level norms count as an instance of meeting higher level norm or value?

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For the sake of

• Higher level elements provide reasons for striving for lower level elements

• “For the sake of” relation is antisymmetrical

• Higher level elements done for their own sake: intrinsic value

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Third challenge

• How to make choices and tradeoffs between conflicting values?

• Incommensurable values

• For how much money are you willing to betray your friend?

• Incommensurable values preclude optimizing

• MCDM, QFD, Pugh charts, AHP

Non optimizing approaches to value conflict in engineering

• Satisficing

• Reasoning about values

• Diversity

• Maximizing is not the (only) appropriate response to all values

4th challenge: How to verify whether the designed system embodies the intended values?

• Can technology embody values?

• Same technology in different (cultural) contexts realizes different values

• But differently designed technologies (with same function) in same user practice also realize different values

• Values embodied in “technology + user practice”