UCSC Emphasis on Technology Designs Essay Write a 250 words reflection on 2 articles, make sure that the essay demonstrates familiarity with the readings a

UCSC Emphasis on Technology Designs Essay Write a 250 words reflection on 2 articles, make sure that the essay demonstrates familiarity with the readings and apprehensible and clear writing V
viewpoints
doi:10.1145/1965724.1965735
Cory Knobel and Geoffrey C. Bowker
Computing Ethics
Values in Design
Focusing on socio-technical design with values
as a critical component in the design process.
V
alues often play out in information
technologies
as disasters needing management. When Facebook
started sharing data about
what people were buying or viewing,
it ended up with digital egg all over its
face. Focusing the initial design process on complicated values of privacy
might have helped Facebook avoid
this uproar. To use another example,
the “terms and conditions” that most
users simply “accept” without reading could be made easier to read and
understand if the values inherent in
fair contracting were incorporated
in the design of such agreements
in the first place. But conversations
and analyses of the values found in
technologies are generally engaged
after design and launch, and most
users are faced with a daunting set
of decisions already made on their
behalf (and often not to their benefit)
and impossible choices if they would
like to do things differently. Sensible
responses to this problem have been
developed over the past 10 years,
and a community of researchers has
formed around the role of human
values in technology design.a A new
book on Values in Design from the
MIT Press Infrastructures series illustrates the issues.
Helen Nissenbaum has created a
Values in Design Council, working with
the National Science Foundation on the
Futures of Internet Architecture (FIA)
a Examples of existing work in along this theme
include Batya Friedman’s values-sensitive design, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum’s
Values at Play, Phoebe Sengers’ reflective design, T.L. Taylor’s values in design in ludic systems, and Ann Cavoukian’s privacy by design.
Figure 1. Results of a Google search on “Cameroon.”
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| j u ly 2 0 1 1 | vo l . 5 4 | n o. 7
research program (see http://www.nyu.
edu/projects/nissenbaum/vid_council.
html). This suite of projects is aimed
at redesigning Internet architecture to
handle ever-expanding modes of usage
with fewer problems due to design mistakes about values. An initial meeting
of people from these projects revealed
three values that need immediate attention. One involves the trade-off between security and privacy: for example,
can we design computing “clouds” so
that search queries cannot be traced to
an individual user or IP except in carefully controlled circumstances subject
to appropriate prior review. Not surprisingly, the U.S. National Security Agency
wants to maintain loopholes that allow
it to pursue the important value of national security. Can these values be reconciled through a compromise design?
Another involves hardwire design for
Digital Rights Management (DRM) that
protects digital rights while permitting
flexibility as information policy evolves.
A third concern, “cultural valence,”
means systems designed by one group
(for example, Americans) should not
impose American values about structure, protocol, use, and policy on nonAmericans as Internet architectures go
global. The point is not that designers
have the wrong values, but that one of
the key features of values is that different people hold different values, and
often hold to those values very strongly.
Infrastructures and Values
Successful infrastructures serve people with different values. A good example of this is mobile technologies.
viewpoints
Figure 2. Designer Mary Flanagan’s reconceptualized classic Atari video games with giant joystick;
http://www.maryflanagan.com/giant-joystick.
Inclusion of GPS capability creates
new opportunities regarding information tied to geography. Mobile applications coupled to social networks allow users to know when they are near
friends. Loopt and FourSquareb show
where friends have “checked in” and
their distances from a user’s current
location to facilitate social gathering
and serendipitous meeting. However,
such technologies can cause tension
in social values as the benefit of potential meetings with friends causes
problems of attention and interrogation, as when a paramour says, “You
said you were going to the store, then
the library, and then home, but you
never checked in. Where were you?” a
GPS-based network applications may
increase locational accountability because, unlike a phone call that might
originate anywhere, GPS-enabled applications carry information about
specific geographic location. In principle, a user can work around “stalking” and other problematic situations
with some mobile apps such as Tall
Tales and Google Latitudec that allow
a user to lie about location, but equating privacy with lying creates its own
values-centric problems. An “open
hand” of location-based transparency
can easily become a “backhand” when
b With over 4 million and 6.5 million registered
users as of February 2011, respectively; see
http://about.loopt.com/tag/loopt/ and http://
foursquare.com/about.
c http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tall-talesgeolocation-spoofing/;
http://mashable.
com/2009/02/04/google-latitude/; http://www.
androidzoom.com/android_applications/
fake%20locations
geographic privacy and autonomy are
compromised.
Another good example of value
clashes concerns search engines.
Google might be the greatest information retrieval tool in world history,
but it falls prey to the “Matthew effect” named for a line in the Gospel
of Matthew (25:29): “For to all those
who have, more will be given, and
they will have an abundance; but from
those who have nothing, even what
they have will be taken away.” The results of a simple Google search on the
word “Cameroon” shown in Figure 1
indicate Wikipedia, the CIA, the U.S.
State Department, and the BBC seem
to know more about Cameroon than
any of its inhabitants. The highestranked site from the country does
not appear until page 4, a link to the
country’s main newspaper. Given that
most users never go beyond the first
few links,d few will get to information
about Cameroon from Cameroon. The
country is officially French-speaking, so
sophisticated searchers might find better results searching for “Cameroun,”
but few English-speaking users would
do this. The algorithm that provides
nearly universal access to knowledge
also unwittingly suppresses knowledge
of African countries. Or is this always unwitting? A search on “Obamacare” produces a taxpayer-paid-for link to http://
www.healthcare.gov as a top hit.1
Interdisciplinary Scholars
A community of scholars has formed
d http://seoblackhat.com/2006/08/11/toolclicks-by-rank-in-google-yahoo-msn/
around VID, or Values in Design (or
more formally, Values in the Design
of Information Systems and Technology). It 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. They
find common ground through the interdisciplinarity implied by the broad
spectrum of interests. Decades of research in the sociology of science and
technology have shown that technical
infrastructures reveal human values
most often through counterproductivity, tension, or failure. Workshops conducted over the past six
years by Helen Nissenbaum, Geoffrey Bowker, and Susan Leigh Star
have sparked conversations among
people in these fields, producing a
cohort of interdisciplinary scholars of values in design. This group
departs from a traditional view of
critical theory that tackles technology once it is in place, and focuses
instead on socio-technical design
with values as a critical 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. This
objective is timely given the rise of
social computing and networks,
games that address social problems
and change (see http://www.gamesforchange.org/) and the interconnection
of corporate, government, and academic institutions’ interests ranging
from the individual to the transglobal.
j u ly 2 0 1 1 | vo l . 5 4 | n o. 7 | c omm u n icatio n s of t he acm
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VID aims to create a new field that understands values and technology in the
early stages of design.
The VID program depends on having sensible definitions for the terms
“values” and “design.” The philosopher
of science Jacob Metcalf provides a useful framing for “values” by comparing it with generally well-understood
concept of ethics. Ethics are a set of
prescriptions (nouns), while values
are tied to action (verbs). VID is a call
to action, an effort in ”verbing” design
work by practical exercises. Exercises
include background readings in computer and information science and information policy literatures. Exercises
also include use of Mary Flanagan’s
Values at Play cards to modify or create
new values-driven computer games,
or Batya Friedman’s Envisioning cards
to reveal social sensitivities during the
design process.e Workshop groups
are split into interdisciplinary teams
that produce a values-driven design in
about one week. Academics and industry experts judge the proposals, which
have ranged from a system to support
community gardening projects and
green space development, to a geocaching system that reveals the geographic
routes by which kidnapped women are
trafficked into the sex trade.
Conclusion
The VID effort has been under way
for 15 years since first articulated,2–4
and for six years at building the cadre
of scholars through workshops. Next
steps are to open the design space
through collaborative interdisciplinary
work; in contrast to customary university training that teaches how to work
individually. The world demands skills
in collaboration, and future designers
must work in highly connected and
intellectually fertile environments.
The VID community sees design as a
process in which constraints impose
new directions for innovation, and
values are a source of constraints. The
VID community is rethinking design
to go beyond user studies, marketing,
documentation, programming, and
e http://www.valuesatplay.org/?page_id=6 and
Friedman, B., Nathan, L. P., Kane, S., and Lin,
J. Envisioning Cards. Value Sensitive Design Research Lab. The Information School, University of Washington. Seattle, WA, 2011; http://
www.envisioningcards.com
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Design must be
integrated in ways
that challenge
assumptions about
what can and cannot
be changed.
implementation to actual engagement
where the rubber truly hits the road.
Design must be integrated in ways that
challenge assumptions about what
can and cannot be changed. 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
(see http://vid.pitt.edu/).
To close, consider the work of theorist, artist, and designer Mary Flanagan
(see http://www.maryflanagan.com/giant-joystick). She has reconceptualized
classic Atari video games by replacing
the single-user, joystick-and-fire button control with a 10-foot high mechanism that requires collaboration and
coordination among several people to
operate the game (see Figure 2). She
subverts design by taking a nontraditional perspective that produces radical reinterpretations of everyday practice. She shows that the social values of
collaboration, cooperation, coordination, and play can transform a takenfor-granted utility, the simple joystick,
into an opportunity for engagement
and discourse about the design of information technologies.
References
1. Diaz, A. Through the Google Goggles: Sociopolitical
bias in search engine design. In Web Search:
Multidisciplinary Perspectives. A. Spink and M. Zimmer,
Eds., Springer New York, 2008.
2. Flanagan, M., Howe, D., and Nissenbaum, H. Values in
Design: Theory and Practice. Working Paper, 2005.
3. Friedman, B., and Nissenbaum, H. Bias in computer
systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems
14, 3 (1996), 330–347.
4. Sengers, P., Boehner, K., David, S., and Kay, J.
Reflective design. In Proceedings of the 4th Decennial
ACM Conference on Critical Computing. (2005).
Cory Knobel (cknobel@sis.pitt.edu) is an assistant
professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Geoffrey C. Bowker (gbowker@sis.pitt.edu) is a professor
and senior scholar in Cyberscholarship at the University
of Pittsburgh.
Copyright held by author.
CHI 2005
???
April 2–7 ? ??Portland, Oregon, USA
PAPERS: Social Behaviors
Values at Play: Design Tradeoffs in Socially-Oriented
Game Design
Mary Flanagan
Tiltfactor Lab, Film & Media
Hunter College
New York, NY, USA
mary@maryflanagan.com
Daniel C. Howe
Media Research Lab
New York University
New York, NY, USA
dhowe@mrl.nyu.edu
Helen Nissenbaum
Dept. of Culture & Communication
New York University
New York, NY, USA
helen.nissenbaum@nyu.edu
Abstract
Significant work in the CHI community has focused on
designing systems that support human values. Designers
and engineers have also become increasingly aware of ways
in which the artifacts they create can embody political,
social, and ethical values. Despite such an awareness, there
has been little work towards producing practical
methodologies that systematically incorporate values into
the design process. Many designers struggle to find a
balance between their own values, those of users and other
stakeholders, and those of the surrounding culture. In this
paper, we present the RAPUNSEL project as a case study
of game design in a values-rich context and describe our
efforts toward navigating the complexities this entails.
Additionally, we present initial steps toward the
development of a systematic methodology for discovery,
analysis, and integration of values in technology design in
the hope that others may both benefit from and build upon
this work.
trust [16,22,38]. Designers and engineers have also become
increasingly aware of ways in which the artifacts they
create can embody political, social, and ethical values. It is
one thing to subscribe, generally, to these ideas, even to
make a pragmatic commitment to them, but putting them
into practice in the design of technical systems such as
software games is not straightforward. Experienced
designers will recall the not too distant past when interface
and usability were overlooked features of software system
design. While these and other aspects of design have now
entered the mainstream of research and practice, we are still
at the shaky beginnings of thinking systematically about
design and values. Even those designers who support the
principle of integrating values into systems are likely to
have trouble applying standard design methodologies,
honed for the purpose of meeting functional requirements,
to the unfamiliar turf of values. What seems absent from
much of the literature on values and technology design—
specifically, computer software design—is a set of explicit
pointers to guide design whose successful endpoint is the
reliable capacity to embed values in software systems. This
is a crucial missing piece that could help those motivated by
the principle to move beyond mere exhortation.
Categories & Subject Descriptors: H.5.2 [Information
Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces—prototyping,
evaluation/methodology, human factors
General Terms: Design, Human Factors
Our team recognizes that there are very different
approaches to defining ‘values’; most are culturally or socioeconomically specific. The modest goal of this paper is not
to assert which values should be of importance, but instead
to demonstrate how to discover relevant values for a
particular project. Not unexpectedly, many designers
struggle to find a balance between their own values, those
of users and other stakeholders, and those of the
surrounding culture. In this paper, we present the
RAPUNSEL project as a prime example and case study of
design in a values-rich context and describe our efforts
toward navigating the complexity this entails.
Keywords: Gender and Computing, Programming
Pedagogy, Social Issues, Values
INTRODUCTION
Significant work in the CHI community has focused on
designing systems that support human values. This work
sets forth values as a design aspiration, exhorting designers
and producers to include values in the set of criteria by
which the excellence of technologies is judged. Research
has focused, for example, on the value of privacy [1,2],
community [13], freedom from bias [23], universal
usability [46], autonomy [48], informed consent [19], and
The aim of this paper is to help fill in this missing element
by sketching a methodological framework for the
consideration of values during the process of design. In
RAPUNSEL, a three-year, NSF-funded project, a team of
computer scientists, interaction designers, and social
psychologists were tasked with the creation of a networked
game environment to teach programming to middle-school
girls. Although it is a large project with multiple interlinked
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CHI 2005, April 2–7, 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA.
Copyright 2005 ACM 1-58113-998-5/05/0004…$5.00.
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CHI 2005
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April 2–7 ? ??Portland, Oregon, USA
PAPERS: Social Behaviors
disadvantaged home environments, to program computers.2
Concerned by data that shows a radical decline of interest in
math, science, and computing in female adolescents [6,8,9,
11,30,49], but noting strong evidence suggesting that
networked software environments and social learning
appealed to girls, project developers sought to correct this
imbalance by developing socially-oriented environments
for learning these subjects. Games, especially online games,
are a significant pastime for the target audience: sixty-five
percent of Internet game users are female [45] and 12.4
million US teenagers use instant messaging regularly.
Social software is especially popular with teens [10,26].
components (e.g. pedagogy, interface, graphics,
networking, etc.), challenging questions about values
emerged in several key phases. It was therefore essential to
the project’s success to both iteratively address questions
concerning values and systematically implement our
answers in the design. The project is still in progress—the
second year of a three-year project; therefore, the system is
being built alongside this methodological outline. Here, we
focus on our design process and values investigation.
Drawing on a number of existing approaches and analytic
frameworks,1 we discuss the set of values that were
considered over the project’s lifecycle. Additionally we
present specific examples of values conflicts we
encountered and their subsequent resolutions. Our approach
is not intended to replace well-established design
methodologies (such as user-centered design, participatory
design, or the iterative design methods specific to game
design noted by [12,51], but rather…
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