Week 10 Notes

Written for Interaction Design Seminar taught by Molly Wright Steenson at Carnegie Mellon University

Introduction

I actually got excited reading this week’s readings on Values in Design—a lot of the ideas were things I had been thinking about and wanting to research, though in some cases I felt the papers went in a slightly different direction than I expected or would have hoped.

In Cameron Tonkinwise’s seminar last year, he always urged us to look into the background of the author(s) to see what perspective they were coming from. For this week, it was really interesting for me to read more about the backgrounds and research of all the authors. I felt myself thinking, “that’s exactly what I want to do!” In many cases I could see myself wanting to go back and read more by these researchers or learn more about the work they are doing.

Computing Ethics: Values in Design

I started off with this reading and was excited by so many of the ideas that were brought up in this (see notes below). The part where the authors write about “problems of attention and interrogation” when it comes to social media made me think about how social media and the NSA actually work in concert (even if unintentionally). My “hypothesis” is that social media has actually contributed to the erosion of privacy by encouraging users to over-share on social media in order to gain more “likes.” By blurring the lines of what is public and private, they have made it very easy for the NSA to encroach into our private lives with very little protest, because people are offering up so much information willingly anyway. The authors mention apps like “Tall Tales and Google Latitude,” so for those that do want to evade being tracked, they essentially have to lie. As Molly mentioned about her friend wanting to hide her pregnancy, you come off as suspect just by trying to keep your personal information private.

Back on topic: the authors write, “[VID] consists of researchers and practitioners in computer science, engineering, human-computer interaction, science and technology studies, anthropology, communications, law, philosophy, information science, and art and design.” Wonderful that this is such an interdisciplinary effort!

Notes

• “successful infrastructures serve people with different values.” (26)
• ??: “technical infrastructures reveal human values most often through counterproductivity, tension, or failure.”
• ❤ “This group… focuses instead on socio-technical design with values as a critial component in the design process. The objective of VID is to create infrastructures that produce less friction over values than those created in the past.”
• “Ethics are a set of prescriptions (nouns), while values are tied to action (verbs).”
• “A newly forming Center for Values in Design at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences will explore and apply these ideas as they emerge.” — how did I not know about this??
• Corey Knobel’s EVOKE Lab at UC Irvine: social + media theory and technology design **

Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment

“Manipulate” for me here was the key word. I find it so problematic that Facebook has been known to manipulate users and use their data for their own advantages, but still has over 2 billion users. I also find this indicative of how little people are thinking about the digital technology that they use.

Facebook consistently says they “do research to improve [their] services and to make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible.” Do we need to be engaged so much that we are willing to allow a tech giant to manipulate our emotional states for their own gain?

This article was pretty upsetting to read. Moving on…

Reflective Design

I started out really liking this paper and the discussions brought up at the beginning, but was disappointed by the case studies. I loved the idea of the “assumptions that underlie our technical practices may unwittingly be propagated throughout our culture,” and “the ways in which technologies reflect and perpetuate unconscious cultural assumptions.” It made me think of (yet another!) potential area of research related to the cultural artifacts of colonialism (also related to Eurocentric design that Ahmed Ansari sometimes talks about.) How do those colonial artifacts continue to shape former colonies and perpetuate ‘colonial mindsets’? Interesting to think about…

The discussion about critical theory and the Enlightenment reminded me of a book I read “Ideas Have Consequences” by Richard Weaver. Maybe I should re-read from the perspective of design and technology. I’m also fascinated by ideas like worldviews and cognitive frames that are deeply embedded in us and our way of seeing and being in the world. Interesting to think where these frames come from, what sticks and what doesn’t, how they shape us, and most importantly, how to undo the destructive ones.

The “Foundations of Reflective Design” were enlightening and interesting to read. The critique about participatory design not examining “the values which users and designers share” made me think about Mark and Hannah’s work at Fit Associates. I actually think they do a good job of prioritizing values and making the shared values apparent.

I found the case studies extremely odd for this paper. It was strange to me that the authors encouraged thinking more critically about technology, but then tried to insert technology in places and ways that obstruct the experience. They seemed to be more an investigation into how technology can be used to probe and gather data rather than getting to what is really important in life.

I visited The Art Institute of Chicago over the summer and, when buying my ticket, was encouraged to download their app and pay for the guided tour, which was really just a gadget with numbers to punch whenever I came across certain works throughout the museum. I found both of these tools very distracting and cumbersome. Visiting an art museum with such great works to me is an experience to be had and felt. I don’t want to spend my whole time there fumbling with gadgets and looking down at my phone.

Furthermore, there are some metaphysical / ineffable aspects of life (like intimacy!) that can’t be quantified by technology. When we read correspondence that people in the past wrote and received, those letters express SOOO much more intimacy, warmth, love, and feeling than a circle that changes colors. I think the problem is not with finding technology to mediate relationships, but finding the mental space and time to be able to sit down and write a meaningful letter to someone we miss and love. It’s technology that is causing the problem; more technology won’t fix it. Technology does not need to intervene everywhere and mediate everything, and I think people who advance that frame of thinking are missing the mark and adding uselessly to the already overwhelming digital noise.

Notes

• ** “As designers, we are left to wonder: what values, attitudes, and ways of looking at the world are we unconsciously building into our technology.” **
• “question why particular aspects of human life were left out of design.”
• “Critical reflection identifies unconscious assumptions in HCI that may result in negative impacts on our quality of life.”
• ** “Critical theory argues that our everyday values, practices, perspectives, and sense of agency and self are strongly shaped by forces and agendas of which we are normally unaware, such as the politics of race, gender, and economics. Critical reflection provides a means to gain some awareness of such forces as a first step toward possible change.” **
• Reflection: “bringing unconscious aspects of experience to conscious awareness, thereby making them available for conscious choice. This critical reflection is critical to both individual freedom and our quality of life in society as a whole, since without it, we unthinkingly adopt attitudes, practices, values, and identities we might not consciously espouse.”**
• “A critical designer designs objects not to do what users want and value, but to introduce both designers and users to new ways of looking at the world around them and the role that designed objects can play for them in it.”
• Phoebe Sengers: “looking at how changing sociotechnical infrastructures are tied with changing orientations to time, technology, and labor.”<< seems like such interesting research

Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems

This was a good introduction to the theory of VSD. I appreciated how they defined values, that they listed out “human values often implicated in system design” (17), and that they offered how people can start using VSD (15).

I thought the Cookies and Informed Consent case was an interesting study into inserting more value into existing technology. The Room with a View case was interesting but at the same time strange. If we need to find ways to digitally insert the natural world into our lives, then something with how our workplaces and lives are structured is fundamentally flawed. Once again, is more technology really the answer? This feels like a bandage on a much deeper problem.

Eight features of VSD:
1. Be proactive, influence early in and throughout the design process
2. Enlarge the arena beyond the workplace to “education, home, commerce, online communities, and public life.”
3. Unique methodology applied iteratively and integratively
4. “Include all values, especially those with moral import.”
5. “[Distinguish] between usability and human values with ethical import.”
6. “Two classes of stakeholders: direct and indirect.”
7. “An interactional theory”
8. “Certain values are universally held”

Notes

• VSD “is a theoretically grounded approach to the design of technology that accounts for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner throughout the design process.”
• ** “‘is’ does not imply ‘ought’ (the naturalistic fallacy)” << so simple but how profound if properly applied
• “We have to reject the ‘worshiping [of] the new gadgets which are our own creation as if they were our masters’” — Norbert Wiener
• ** Joseph Weizenbaum: “What is wrong, I think is that we have permitted technological metaphors…and technique itself to so thoroughlypervade our thought processes that we have finally abdicated to technology the very duty to formulate questions…Where a simple man might ask: ‘Do we need these things?’, technology asks ‘what electronic wizardly will make them safe?’ Where a simple man will ask ‘is it good?’, technology asks ‘will it work’?” **
• Peter H. Kahn: Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems Lab (The HINTS Lab) << seems like interesting research area

Post Script

Our in-class discussion about these readings really helped me think through some of these topics on a deeper level. Thank you Molly Wright Steenson for giving us the time and space to discuss!

… In fact, since that class I’ve been thinking more about the word “manipulate,” and that some designers might see “manipulation” as an integral part of what they do. It made me think back to the “‘is’ does not imply ‘ought’” statement from the VSD reading, and also the danger of words losing their meaning. If manipulation becomes associated with the work of design, that will be highly problematic for and a disservice to the profession and users alike.