Value Sensitive Design

A design approach, with ready-made methods and card decks, for identifying the people and human values a technology affects and building those values into the design from the start.

What it is¶

Value Sensitive Design (VSD) combines three kinds of investigation: conceptual work on which values and stakeholders matter, empirical work with the people involved, and technical work on how design choices support or undermine those values. It explicitly includes indirect stakeholders, people who never use the system but are affected by it. The VSD Lab at the University of Washington publishes toolkits such as the Envisioning Cards, a deck of prompts on stakeholders, time, values, pervasiveness and multi-lifespan effects that you can use in design sessions.

In healthcare¶

The VSD Lab reports that the Envisioning Cards have been used in East Africa to help design national health care systems. VSD is also one of the foundations of the Moral Medtech game for medical AI.

Where to use it in The ELSA Way¶

• Stakeholder engagement › When to engage: VSD treats stakeholder and value analysis as work that continues through the whole design process, and its focus on indirect stakeholders helps you see who to involve before decisions are fixed.

• Intended use and user requirements › User requirements: The Envisioning Cards prompt you to think about roles, contexts of use and long-term effects, which helps you write user requirements that cover more than the clinical function.

References¶

• Friedman B. Value-sensitive design. Interactions. 1996;3(6):16-23. Friedman (1996)

• Friedman B, Hendry DG. Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2019. Friedman & Hendry (2019)

• Friedman B, Hendry DG. The Envisioning Cards: a toolkit for catalyzing humanistic and technical imagination. In: Proceedings of CHI '12. ACM; 2012. p. 1145-1148. Friedman & Hendry (2012)

Related tools¶

• Moral Medtech: A cooperative serious game in which patients, clinicians, developers and regulators agree which values a medical AI tool must protect and turn them into design requirements.

• Ethical Matrix: A simple grid that makes you check, for every group affected by a technology, how it touches their wellbeing, autonomy and fairness, so you can weigh the concerns openly.

• Aanpak Begeleidingsethiek: A facilitated workshop method in which the people affected by a new technology map its effects and values together and agree on concrete actions for the technology, its setting and its users.

Also listed in: RAAIT toolbox.