Ibo van de Poel's fPET-2010 presentation

1. 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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2. What is value-sensitive design
(VSD)?
• Systematic attempt to include values of ethical
importance in design
• Three types of investigations:
• Empirical
• Conceptual
• Technical/engineering
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3. 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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4. 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?

5. 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

6. 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?

7. 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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8. 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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9. 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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10. 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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11. 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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12. 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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13. 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

14. 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

15. Values hierarchy
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16. Example of values hierarchy
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17. 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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18. 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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19. 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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20. 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

21. Non optimizing approaches to value
conflict in engineering
• Satisficing
• Reasoning about values
• Diversity
• Maximizing is not the (only) appropriate response to all
values

22. 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”