Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination

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