Tactics of Soft Resistance in User Experience Professionals' Values Work

User experience (UX) professionals' attempts to address social values as a part of their work practice can overlap with tactics to contest, resist, or change the companies they work for. This paper studies tactics that take place in this overlap, where UX professionals try to re-shape the values embodied and promoted by their companies, in addition to the values embodied and promoted in the technical systems and products that their companies produce. Through interviews with UX professionals working at large U.S.-based technology companies and observations at UX meetup events, this paper identifies tactics used towards three goals: (1) creating space for UX expertise to address values; (2) making values visible and relevant to other organizational stakeholders; and (3) changing organizational processes and orientations towards values. This paper analyzes these as tactics of resistance: UX professionals seek to subvert or change existing practices and organizational structures towards more values-conscious ends. Yet, these tactics of resistance often rely on the dominant discourses and logics of the technology industry. The paper characterizes these as partial or "soft" tactics, but also argues that they nevertheless hold possibilities for enacting values-oriented changes.

[1]  Jes A. Koepfler,et al.  How to see values in social computing: methods for studying values dimensions , 2014, CSCW.

[2]  D. Dennis,et al.  Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed , 1998 .

[3]  Shaowen Bardzell,et al.  Design and Intervention in the Age of "No Alternative" , 2018, Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact..

[4]  Shoshana Zuboff,et al.  In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power , 1989 .

[5]  Jennifer Ann Rode,et al.  (Whose) value-sensitive design: a study of long- distance relationships in an Arabic cultural context , 2011, CSCW.

[6]  Daniela Karin Rosner,et al.  Values in Repair , 2016, CHI.

[7]  Vera D. Khovanskaya,et al.  The Tools of Management: Adapting historical union tactics to platform-mediated labor , 2019 .

[8]  Phoebe Sengers,et al.  Data Rhetoric and Uneasy Alliances: Data Advocacy in US Labor History , 2019, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[9]  Dawn Nafus,et al.  This One Does Not Go Up to 11: The Quantified Self Movement as an Alternative Big Data Practice , 2014 .

[10]  Colin M. Gray,et al.  Dimensions of UX Practice that Shape Ethical Awareness , 2020, CHI.

[11]  Nicole Immorlica,et al.  Power Struggles in the Digital Economy: Platforms, Workers, and Markets , 2018, CSCW Companion.

[12]  S. Timmermans,et al.  Theory Construction in Qualitative Research , 2012 .

[13]  Katie Shilton,et al.  Values Levers , 2013 .

[14]  Colin M. Gray,et al.  Ethical Mediation in UX Practice , 2019, CHI.

[15]  Pamela J. Wisniewski,et al.  Privacy in Context: Critically Engaging with Theory to Guide Privacy Research and Design , 2018, CSCW Companion.

[16]  Katie Shilton.  Technology development with an agenda: Interventions to emphasize values in design , 2010, ASIST.

[17]  Madeleine Akrich,et al.  The De-scription of Technical Objects , 1992 .

[18]  Deirdre K. Mulligan,et al.  Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design Workbooks , 2017, Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact..

[19]  Norah Abokhodair,et al.  Photo Sharing in the Arab Gulf: Expressing the Collective and Autonomous Selves , 2017, CSCW.

[20]  Karin Garrety,et al.  User-Centered Design and the Normative Politics of Technology , 2004 .

[21]  Tom Rodden,et al.  Playing the Legal Card: Using Ideation Cards to Raise Data Protection Issues within the Design Process , 2015, CHI.

[22]  J. Burrell.  The Field Site as a Network: A Strategy for Locating Ethnographic Research , 2009 .

[23]  Alan Borning,et al.  A Survey of Value Sensitive Design Methods , 2018, Found. Trends Hum. Comput. Interact..

[24]  Nick Merrill,et al.  Security Fictions: Bridging Speculative Design and Computer Security , 2020, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[25]  Colin M. Gray,et al.  Surveying the Landscape of Ethics-Focused Design Methods , 2021, ArXiv.

[26]  L. Nathan,et al.  Values as Hypotheses: Design, Inquiry, and the Service of Values , 2015, Design Issues.

[27]  Shoshana Zuboff,et al.  In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power , 1989 .

[28]  Josh Tenenberg,et al.  Arguing about design: A taxonomy of rhetorical strategies deployed by user experience practitioners , 2016, SIGDOC.

[29]  Susan Wyche,et al.  Values as lived experience: evolving value sensitive design in support of value discovery , 2009, CHI.

[30]  J. Orr.  Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job , 1998 .

[31]  J. Orr,et al.  Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. , 1997 .

[32]  S. Woolgar.  Configuring the User: The Case of Usability Trials , 1990 .

[33]  Batya Friedman,et al.  The envisioning cards: a toolkit for catalyzing humanistic and technical imaginations , 2012, CHI.

[34]  Alex Wilkie,et al.  Expectation and Mobilisation , 2009 .

[35]  Lynn Dombrowski,et al.  Worker-Centered Design: Expanding HCI Methods for Supporting Labor , 2020, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[36]  Deirdre K. Mulligan,et al.  Contestability in Algorithmic Systems , 2019, CSCW Companion.

[37]  M. Flanagan,et al.  Embodying values in technology: Theory and practice , 2008 .

[38]  Sara Ahmed,et al.  A Complaint Biography , 2019, Biography.

[39]  Predrag V. Klasnja,et al.  Envisioning systemic effects on persons and society throughout interactive system design , 2008, DIS '08.

[40]  L. Winner.  DO ARTIFACTS HAVE (cid:1) POLITICS? , 2022 .

[41]  Lilly Irani,et al.  “Design Thinking”: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies , 2018 .

[42]  Richmond Y. Wong,et al.  Timelines: A World-Building Activity for Values Advocacy , 2021, CHI.

[43]  Christo Sims.  The Politics of Design, Design as Politics , 2016 .

[44]  Emanuel Moss,et al.  Owning Ethics: Corporate Logics, Silicon Valley, and the Institutionalization of Ethics , 2019 .

[45]  Anna Lauren Hoffmann,et al.  Terms of inclusion: Data, discourse, violence , 2020, New Media Soc..

[46]  Pamela J. Wisniewski,et al.  Ubiquitous Privacy: Research and Design for Mobile and IoT Platforms , 2019, CSCW Companion.

[47]  Dawn Nafus,et al.  The Real Problem: Rhetorics of Knowing in Corporate Ethnographic Research , 2006 .

[48]  Laura A. Dabbish,et al.  Working with Machines: The Impact of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Management on Human Workers , 2015, CHI.

[49]  Colin M. Gray.  Evolution of design competence in UX practice , 2014, CHI.

[50]  Stephanie Ballard,et al.  Judgment Call the Game: Using Value Sensitive Design and Design Fiction to Surface Ethical Concerns Related to Technology , 2019, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[51]  Batya Friedman,et al.  Value-sensitive design , 1996, INTR.

[52]  Nicola Dell,et al.  "Is my phone hacked?" Analyzing Clinical Computer Security Interventions with Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence , 2019, Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact..

[53]  Carol Saunders,et al.  The Personal in the Policy Cascade , 2019, J. Assoc. Inf. Syst..

[54]  Johnny Saldaña,et al.  The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers , 2009 .

[55]  Erin Friess,et al.  Personas and decision making in the design process: an ethnographic case study , 2012, CHI.

[56]  Hanna M. Wallach,et al.  Co-Designing Checklists to Understand Organizational Challenges and Opportunities around Fairness in AI , 2020, CHI.

[57]  Seda Gürses,et al.  Privacy after the Agile Turn , 2016 .

[58]  Anthony Dunne,et al.  Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects , 2001 .

[59]  Daniela Karin Rosner,et al.  Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design , 2018 .

[60]  Deirdre K. Mulligan,et al.  Bringing Design to the Privacy Table: Broadening “Design” in “Privacy by Design” Through the Lens of HCI , 2019, CHI.

[61]  D. Freed.  Analyzing Clinical Computer Security Interventions with Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence , 2019 .

[62]  A. Hochschild,et al.  The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. , 1985 .

[63]  Luke Stark,et al.  Better, Nicer, Clearer, Fairer: A Critical Assessment of the Movement for Ethical Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning , 2019, HICSS.

[64]  Helen Nissenbaum,et al.  How computer systems embody values , 2001, Computer.

[65]  Danna Gurari,et al.  Good Systems: Ethical AI for CSCW , 2019, CSCW Companion.

[66]  Juliane Jung,et al.  The Practice Of Everyday Life , 2016 .