Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination

By Saraleah Fordyce. 2019

659 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Design expresses and shapes human values, either with intention or by default. In their recent book, Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination, Batya Friedman and David G. Hendry, who both teach in the Information School at the University of Washington and who are members of the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab, which Friedman directs, call for foregrounding human values in process and product. They define the field of “value sensitive design” as one that seeks to guide how we live with technology, offering “theory, method, and practice to account for human values in a principled and systematic manner throughout the technical design process” (4). Both descriptive and prescriptive, they outline major projects that have shaped the field since it was established in the 1990s and offer recommendations for designers. They claim the reigns as the stewards of the field, both defending how they’ve named it and describing what it encompasses. In the first of the book’s five chapters, the authors argue that “all technologies to some degree reflect, and reciprocally affect, human values,” and that “in designing tools we are designing ways of being” (1). They call for designers to take an explicit ethical position as shapers of human experience and translators of value. Of course, the question of what values and whose values comes up quickly for the reader. The authors define human values as “what is important to people in their lives” (24) emphasizing well-being, dignity, and justice while at the same time allowing for the idea that values are often context dependent. This is demonstrated in the projects they highlight, such as one focusing on improving transit for people with disabilities, and another that uses software to model the long-term results of zoning and land-use scenarios. All of the featured projects are altruistic, optimistic, and open ended, but Friedman and Hendry acknowledge critiques that question notions of universal values, and the difficulties of distinguishing between designer and stakeholder values. The second chapter lays out the theory of value sensitive design through a defense of terms and a list of commitments. For example, by using the term “sensitive” rather than “centered,” they recognize a way of working within a larger design process. The commitments are constitutive; they both describe and help construct the field. For example, in its expanded conception of stakeholders, value sensitive design goes beyond direct stakeholders—who we often call Saraleah Fordyce is Adjunct Faculty in Critical Studies and MFA Design at California College of the Arts. sfordyce@cca.edu © 2019 Saraleah Fordyce DOI: 10.1080/ 17547075.2019.1684698

Subfields: AI Ethics, Fairness & Society, Human-Computer Interaction, Philosophy

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Citations in the corpus

Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of “Bias” in NLP (2020, background): “…design provides a framework for accounting for the values of different stakeholders in the design of technology (e.g., Friedman et al., 2006; Friedman and Hendry, 2019; Le Dantec et al., 2009; Yoo et al., 2019), while participatory design seeks to involve stakeholders in the design process…”
Sociotechnical Harms of Algorithmic Systems: Scoping a Taxonomy for Harm Reduction (2022, background): “It can be strengthened by bringing in different standpoints and epistemologies, such as feminism [73, 155], value-based design [17, 88, 116], design justice perspectives [60], and post-colonial theories [126, 148].”
Contributions and Risks of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Building Smarter Cities: Insights from a Systematic Review of the Literature (2020, background): “are designed take on a value-sensitive design approach [170].”
Gender Bias in Machine Translation (2021, methodology): “Hereby, drawing on the humancentered approach of Value Sensitive Design (Friedman and Hendry, 2019), we consider as biased an MT model that systematically and unfairly discriminates against certain individuals or groups in favour of others (Friedman and Nissenbaum, 1996).”
Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing via Large Pre-trained Language Models: A Survey (2021, positive): “[12] recommend careful planning, documentation of the training data, as well as value sensitive design [47] as a mitigation strategy in the PLM development process to identify the values to be expressed and supported (or a lack of support may result in harm).”
Confronting Power and Corporate Capture at the FAccT Conference (2022, background): “A more thorough account would build on traditions from human computer interaction, like value sensitive design, which acknowledge competing interests in these design decisions [21] and call for greater accountability from those who produce and adopt technologies that intervene in human lives [13].”
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜 (2021, background): “Value sensitive design [49, 50] provides a range of methodologies for identifying stakeholders (both direct stakeholders who will use a technology and indirect stakeholders who will be affected through others’ use of it), working with them to identify their values, and designing systems that support”
Reusable Templates and Guides For Documenting Datasets and Models for Natural Language Processing and Generation: A Case Study of the HuggingFace and GEM Data and Model Cards (2021, methodology): “To guide the development of our templates, we draw from the methods of value sensitive design (eg., Friedman and Hendry, 2019) by identifying stakeholders and assessing their values, which Friedman and Hendry deﬁne as “what is important to people in their lives, with a focus on ethics and morality”…”
Sociotechnical Harms: Scoping a Taxonomy for Harm Reduction (2022, background): “It can be strengthened by bringing in different standpoints and epistemologies, such as feminism [63, 136], value-based design [17, 78, 99], design justice perspectives [51], and post-colonial theories [108, 129].”