Values Sensitive Practice
Bringing stakeholders’ values into the conversation early in the design process
Simply defined, values are things are important to someone. Values often manifest as a set of beliefs or principles that guide people’s decisions. Some values can be shared across groups and organizations, while others unique to each individual.
There are values embedded into the design of every product, service and system–be it consciously or unconsciously. The values that play out in these creations are a result of numerous negotiations between priorities and constraints. It’s hardly ever a spontaneous outcome, but rather a result of numerous negotiations between priorities, constraints and plays of power.
I think we can do better though. By placing values at the heart of the things we design, it allows us to be more deliberate in how we design for them. Values also provide a common language that is used and understood across different functions; a common thread that weaves through business, marketing, engineering and design. This makes values something that can unite teams across disciplines and provide a shared focal point.
Value Sensitive Design
In Value Sensitive Design: Theory and Methods, Batya Friedman et al. put forth a framework for considering values more deeply in the design process. Value Sensitive Design essentially calls for designers and design teams to proactively engage in discourse over the values we design for and how they play out when our creations are used in the world.
VSD consists of the following three parts…
Conceptual Investigations: Engaging with questions, such as “What are values? Whose values should be supported in the design process? How are values supported or diminished by particular technological designs?” [1] In this stage, designers thoughtfully consider the values of various direct and indirect stakeholders informed by their existing understanding of the issues at hand.
Empirical Investigations: An understanding of stakeholders’ values based on empirical research. “How do stakeholders apprehend individual values in the interactive context? How do they prioritize competing values in design trade-offs? How do they prioritize individual values and usability considerations?” [1 ]are some of the questions addressed at this stage.
Technical Investigations: This stage focuses “on how existing technological properties and underlying mechanisms support or hinder human values” [1]. It aims to surface the innate properties of the medium being used to develop an understanding of its impact on the values discussed in the earlier stage.
Bridging Theory & Practice
In an attempt to make the VSD framework more accessible and easily incorporated into the design process, I’ve created ValueMapper, a tool that walks designers through key elements of the framework. Starting with identifying stakeholders in the system they are designing for, considering their varied values as well as competing values, and finally, making informed trade-offs.
In some areas of design practice, such as service design, the idea of mapping stakeholders is used frequently. In such cases, these diagrams are typically limited to illustrating exchanges (of value), interactions and hierarchies. With ValueMapper, I hope to add a crucial layer to stakeholder maps, one that visualizes stakeholders’ values and the intermingling of values across stakeholders in a system.
ValueMapper: How It Works
ValueMapper consists of the canvas below designed to take designers step-by-step through the process of identifying:
- Stakeholders–primary and secondary
- Stakeholder’ values
- Potentially conflicting values
- Trade-offs that might need to be made
- Values naturally supported or hindered by technical mediums being considered
Designers are also given a set of Value Cards to serve as inspiration as they complete the canvas. Values can be difficult to articulate, my hope is for these cards to help designers make associations between these values and those of their stakeholders, and spark ideas for other values that are specific to the context they are working in.
My hope is that the canvas can be iterated upon to include new discoveries made through user research, either by adding them to an existing canvas or updating the entire canvas.
The stakeholder canvas is intentionally separated from the rest of activities to make it flexible in how its used. If needed, multiple stakeholder canvases can be used together to create bigger and more detailed stakeholder value maps.
ValueMapper In Action
To test ValueMapper and its integration into the design process, I had design students give an initial prototype a try. They used it to think through projects they were currently working on. While one of them was in the early exploratory phase of the project, another was towards the tail end of their project.
In this version, they used colored stickers to mark values that were in conflict with the values of a particular stakeholder. For example, in the image on the bottom left, all values marked with a blue sticker were in potential conflict with the blue stakeholder (parents).
What worked?
- The set of Values Cards proved to be useful in kickstarting ideas as participants filled out the canvas. It also helped them frame other values that weren’t represented in the set of cards in a way that was meaningful for the activity.
- Doing this activity allowed participants to visualize the interests of different stakeholders in a way that made moments of alignment and conflict explicit. From the feedback, doing this helped them see larger patterns across stakeholders. This was especially true in cases where multiple stakeholders sharing the same values posed a challenge. For example, if two stakeholders wanted privacy (over their information) and transparency (in the other’s information). Making these conflicts explicit creates the opportunity for participants to dive deeper when exploring resolutions.
- Using ValueMapper allowed participants to see beyond one-to-one interactions and visualize big-picture patterns between stakeholder values. In doing so, this could raise new ways of addressing values.
- Another point raised during testing was that hanging the sheets on the wall of their workspace could surface a deeper, more subconscious contemplation of values and means of designing for them.
What could be improved?
- Given that finding relationships between values of different stakeholders was integral to the goal of this exercise, using stickers to indicate conflicts was didn’t do this justice. Participants naturally tended towards drawing lines and arrows to make connections. It would be better if the canvas better supported this natural tendency.
- The canvas worked fine for looking at a 3–5 direct stakeholders. However, things could get tricky should projects impact more direct stakeholders or if participants want to include indirect stakeholders in the mapping. Consider how the canvas could be expanded to consider a larger set of stakeholders. Perhaps, making the stakeholder canvas modular, allowing more sheets to used in conjunction with each other.
- Finally, as designers learn more about users, their assumptions about users’ values evolves. Consider how the canvas can be revised to reflect learnings made along the way.
[1] Value Sensitive Design: Theory and Methods by Batya Friedman et al.
