Value-sensitive design

Human values impact people's information behavior. Imagine, for example, that a young Muslim man is interested in exploring the historical roots of jihad for a term paper. Imagine, too, that his library logs all digital reference interactions, and has a policy that if subpoenaed, such logs can be made available to law enforcement agencies. Under such conditions , this man might well decide to seek relevant information by other means, as he seeks to balance the value of access to information with other competing values such as privacy, consent, personal safety, security , and religious freedom. Despite the clear importance of values in human information behavior, the information behavior field does not yet have a comprehensive way of approaching this area. Value Sensitive Design offers one such approach. Value Sensitive Design (VSD) emerged in the 1990s as an approach to the design of information and computer systems that accounts for human values throughout the design process Two overarching goals motivate VSD: 1) to be proactive about human values in system design, and 2) to do so in a manner that is principled, comprehensive, and systematic. VSD particularly emphasizes values with moral import, including privacy, trust, human dignity, respect for person, physical and psychological well-being, informed consent, intellectual property, access, universal usability, freedom from bias, moral responsibility, and moral accountability. While emphasizing the moral perspective, VSD also accounts for usability (e.g., ease of use), conventions (e.g., standardization of technical protocols), and personal predilections (e.g., color preferences within a graphical interface). Key features of VSD involve its 368