Values In Design

Values-In-Design (VID) is built upon the thesis that technological systems often embody political, social, and ethical values*. Further, VID commits to the practical goal of working out how to design systems so that they embody specific values to which a surrounding society is committed. In a liberal democratic society such values might include liberty, autonomy, justice, freedom, security, basic welfare, and privacy. (These are merely examples of, most likely, an indefinitely long list.) This commitment poses a challenge to those involved in system design to adopt values as one among a select set of criteria according to which system quality is defined (more traditional metrics might include efficiency, robustness, & usability among others). But how to meet this challenge, how to design for values, remains an open question whose ideal answer will likely take the form of clearly articulated methodologies that system designers might apply to a variety of design contexts.

*This is a complex claim put forward in various forms by a number or prominent philosophers, social scientists & technologists (e.g. Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner, Thomas Hughes, Donald Mackenzie, Madelaine Akrich, Bruno Latour, Helen Nissenbaum, Philip Brey, Batya Friedman, Lawrence Lessig)

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