Week 10: Value-Sensitive Design and Designing Ethically

Seminar One, Molly Wright Steenson
Carnegie Mellon, Fall 2017

This week, we read:

• Cory Knobel & Geof Bowker, “Values in Design,” Communications of the ACM54: 7 (July 2011): 26–28. Very short. Introduces the idea of values in design.
• Batya Friedman, Peter H. Kahn, Jr., and Alan Borning,” “Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems,” in: Human-Computer Interaction in Management Information Systems: Foundations, 2006. This piece is longer and more academic in tone. Focus on sections 1–3, then skip to p. 15, to “Practical Suggestions for Using Value Sensitive Design,” then go back to read the case studies that start on page 4. Friedman’s research in this area goes back some 25 years, and it’s more relevant than ever.
• Phoebe Sengers, Kirsten Boehner, Shay David & Jofish Kaye, “Reflective Design,” Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing: Between Sense and Sensibility (2005): 49–58.
• Robinson Meyer, “Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment,” June 28, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/

I had questions about the comparisons between Max-Neef’s needs and the values the were provided in the Knobel and Bowker article.