Tag / Ethics

by Richmond

HCI & Values in Design Reading List

From some recent conversations that I’ve had, I’ve been reflecting on what I might put on a reading list or syllabus to try to introduce someone to HCI perspectives on “values in design” and thought I’d put them together here! Some of this draws on the syllabus from “Technology and Delegation,” the Berkeley School of Information graduate course I helped teach with Deirdre Mulligan for a couple years.

These are predominantly pieces that I’ve found useful for my own thinking, or useful in a teaching context. As such, it’s a necessarily partial list. So thoughts/feedback/additions welcome – feel free to reach out at ryw9 {at} berkeley.edu

Introducing Values in Design

Some higher level and survey pieces to orient ourselves. (I’m assuming that people have already bought into the idea that technologies are not neutral. If not, I might point to Madeleine Akrich’s “The De-Scription of Technical Objects” or  Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” as intro pieces that point to the ways technical artifacts can be enrolled in promoting certain values and politics).

What Are Values?

What are values? How are they viewed in different disciplines? Ranging from the more universal views of human rights, to more situated and contextual perspectives, to the law’s distinction between substantive and procedural values.

Conceptualizing the Values Problem

There are lots of different ways we might think about “cutting the cake” of a given values problem. We can look at the same problem space from lots of perspectives using different methods. These papers provide some tools and frameworks to help us think about different approaches to the problem space.

  • Katie Shilton, Jes A. Koepfler, and Kenneth R. Fleischmann. 2014. How to see values in social computing: Methods for Studying Values Dimensions. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW ’14), 426–435. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531625
  • Deirdre K. Mulligan, Colin Koopman, and Nick Doty. 2016. Privacy is an essentially contested concept: a multi-dimensional analytic for mapping privacy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 374, 2083. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2016.0118
  • Deirdre K. Mulligan, Joshua A. Kroll, Nitin Kohli, and Richmond Y. Wong. 2019. This Thing Called Fairness: Disciplinary confusion realizing a value in technology. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW: 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359221

User Centered Design

A brief overview of how user and human centered design has thought about human actions historically, as well as some contemporary examples of human centered design in products and services.

Value Sensitive Design

VSD methods can be seen as an attempt to broaden the purview of user & human centered design to explicitly consider social values in the design process.

  • Batya Friedman, Peter H. Kahn, and Alan Borning. 2008. Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems. In The Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics, Kenneth Einar Himma and Herman T. Tavani (eds.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 69–101. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-7844-3_4 
  • Batya Friedman, David G. Hendry, and Alan Borning. 2017. A Survey of Value Sensitive Design Methods. Foundations and Trends® in Human–Computer Interaction 11, 2: 63–125. https://doi.org/10.1561/1100000015
  • Batya Friedman and David Hendry. 2012. The envisioning cards: a toolkit for catalyzing humanistic and technical imaginations. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’12), 1145–1148. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208562

Critically Oriented Design Approaches

Some design approaches use design practices towards other ends than “solving problems”, such as surfacing and re-framing problems, asking questions, or articulating alternative social and technical configurations of the world.

  • Bill Gaver and Heather Martin. 2000. Alternatives: exploring information appliances through conceptual design proposals. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’00): 209–216. https://doi.org/10.1145/332040.332433
  • Phoebe Sengers, Kirsten Boehner, Shay David, and Joseph Jofish Kaye. 2005. Reflective Design. In 4th decennial conference on Critical computing: between sense and sensibility (CC ’05), 49–58. https://doi.org/10.1145/1094562.1094569
  • Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. 2013. Beyond Radical Design? Chapter 1 in Speculative Everything. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  • Matt Malpass. 2016. Critical Design Practice: Theoretical Perspectives and Methods of Engagement. The Design Journal 19, 3: 473–489. https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2016.1161943
  • Karin Hansson, Laura Forlano, Jaz Hee Jeong Choi, Carl Disalvo, Teresa Cerratto Pargman, Shaowen Bardzell, Silvia Lindtner, and Somya Joshi. 2018. Provocation, conflict, and appropriation: The role of the designer in making publics. Design Issues 34, 4: 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00506

What Does it Mean to Use “Design”?

After the previous sections, we might reflect a bit on the politics and knowledge claims involved in using different types of design practices. And reflect on when we might turn to other mechanisms and practices beyond design.

Incorporating Stakeholders

What are different ways we (as researchers, designers, community members, etc.) engage with other stakeholders?

Values Case Studies

Privacy

  • Batya Friedman, Ian Smith, Peter H. Kahn, Sunny Consolvo, and Jaina Selawski. 2006. Development of a Privacy Addendum for Open Source Licenses: Value Sensitive Design in Industry. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’06), 194–211. https://doi.org/10.1007/11853565_12 
  • Pam Briggs and Lisa Thomas. 2015. An Inclusive, Value Sensitive Design Perspective on Future Identity Technologies. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 22, 5: 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1145/2778972

Contestability

  • Tad Hirsch, Kritzia Merced, Shrikanth Narayanan, Zac E. Imel, and David C. Atkins. 2017. Designing Contestability: Interaction design, machine learning, and mental health. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems – DIS ’17, 95–99. https://doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064703

Justice & Feminist Perspectives

These help contextualize values issues in longer-term and structural relations of power and harm.

  • Lynn Dombrowski, Ellie Harmon, and Sarah Fox. 2016. Social Justice-Oriented Interaction Design. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ’16), 656–671. https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901861
  • Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard and Lone Koefoed Hansen. 2018. Intimate Futures: Staying with the Trouble of Digital Personal Assistants through Design Fiction. In Proceedings of the 2018 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2018 – DIS ’18, 869–880. https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196766
  • Mariam Asad. 2019. Prefigurative Design as a Method for Research Justice. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW: 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359302 

Organizational Contexts

How might we consider the organizational, social, and cultural contexts in which we try to apply the methods and tools we’ve discussed? What challenges might occur?

Values in the Longer Term

How might we consider values (and associated practices of labor) over longer periods of time?

  • Lara Houston, Steven J Jackson, Daniela K Rosner, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Meg Young, and Laewoo Kang. 2016. Values in Repair. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI ’16, 1403–1414. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858470
  • Daisy Yoo, Katie Derthick, Shaghayegh Ghassemian, Jean Hakizimana, Brian Gill, and Batya Friedman. 2016. Multi-lifespan Design Thinking: Two Methods and a Case Study with the Rwandan Diaspora. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI ’16, 4423–4434. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858366

 

by Richmond

Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design Workbooks [Talk]

This blog post is a version of a talk I gave at the 2018 ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) Conference based on a paper written with Deirdre Mulligan, Ellen Van Wyk, John Chuang, and James Pierce, entitled Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design Workbooks, which was honored with a best paper award. Find out more on our project page, our summary blog post, or download the paper: [PDF link] [ACM link]

In the work described in our paper, we created a set of conceptual speculative designs to explore privacy issues around emerging biosensing technologies, technologies that sense human bodies. We then used these designs to help elicit discussions about privacy with students training to be technologists. We argue that this approach can be useful for Values in Design and Privacy by Design research and practice.

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by Richmond

Engaging Technologists to Reflect on Privacy Using Design Workbooks

This post summarizes a research paper, Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design Workbooks, co-authored with Deirdre Mulligan, Ellen Van Wyk, John Chuang, and James Pierce. The paper will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) on Monday November 5th (in the afternoon Privacy in Social Media session). Full paper available here.

Recent wearable and sensing devices, such as Google Glass, Strava, and internet-connected toys have raised questions about ways in which privacy and other social values might be implicated by their development, use, and adoption. At the same time, legal, policy, and technical advocates for “privacy by design” have suggested that privacy should embedded into all aspects of the design process, rather than being addressed after a product is released, or rather than being addressed as just a legal issue. By advocating that privacy be addressed through technical design processes, the ability for technology professionals to surface, discuss, and address privacy and other social values becomes vital.

Companies and technologists already use a range of tools and practices to help address privacy, including privacy engineering practices, or making privacy policies more readable and usable. But many existing privacy mitigation tools are either deductive, or assume that privacy problems already known and well-defined in advance. However we often don’t have privacy concerns well-conceptualized in advance when creating systems. Our research shows that design approaches (drawing on a set of techniques called speculative design and design fiction) can help better explore, define, perhaps even anticipate, the what we mean by “privacy” in a given situation. Rather than trying to look at a single, abstract, universal definition of privacy, these methods help us think about privacy as relations among people, technologies, and institutions in different types of contexts and situations.

Creating Design Workbooks

We created a set of design workbooks — collections of design proposals or conceptual designs, drawn together to allow designers to investigate, explore, reflect on, and expand a design space. We drew on speculative design practices: in brief, our goal was to create a set of slightly provocative conceptual designs to help engage people in reflections or discussions about privacy (rather than propose specific solutions to problems posed by privacy).

A set of sketches that comprise the design workbook

Inspired by science fiction, technology research, and trends from the technology industry, we created a couple dozen fictional products, interfaces, and webpages of biosensing technologies, or technologies that sense people. These included smart camera enabled neighborhood watch systems, advanced surveillance systems, implantable tracking devices, and non-contact remote sensors that detect people’s heartrates. In earlier design work, we reflected on how putting the same technologies in different types of situations, scenarios, and social contexts, would vary the types of privacy concerns that emerged (such as the different types of privacy concerns that would emerge if advanced miniatures cameras were used by the police, by political advocates, or by the general public). However, we wanted to see how non-researchers might react to and discuss the conceptual designs.

How Did Technologists-In-Training View the Designs?

Through a series of interviews, we shared our workbook of designs with masters students in an information technology program who were training to go into the tech industry. We found several ways in which they brought up privacy-related issues while interacting with the workbooks, and highlight three of those ways here.

TruWork — A product webpage for a fictional system that uses an implanted chip allowing employers to keep track of employees’ location, activities, and health, 24/7.

First, our interviewees discussed privacy by taking on multiple user subject positions in relation to the designs. For instance, one participant looked at the fictional TruWork workplace implant design by imagining herself in the positions of an employer using the system and an employee using the system, noting how the product’s claim of creating a “happier, more efficient workplace,” was a value proposition aimed at the employer rather than the employee. While the system promises to tell employers whether or not their employees are lying about why they need a sick day, the participant noted that there might be many reasons why an employee might need to take a sick day, and those reasons should be private from their employer. These reflections are valuable, as prior work has documented how considering the viewpoints of direct and indirect stakeholders is important for considering social values in design practices.

CoupleTrack — an advertising graphic for a fictional system that uses an implanted chip for people in a relationship wear in order to keep track of each other’s location and activities.

A second way privacy reflections emerged was when participants discussed the designs in relation to their professional technical practices. One participant compared the fictional CoupleTrack implant to a wearable device for couples that he was building, in order to discuss different ways in which consent to data collection can be obtained and revoked. CoupleTrack’s embedded nature makes it much more difficult to revoke consent, while a wearable device can be more easily removed. This is useful because we’re looking for ways workbooks of speculative designs can help technologists discuss privacy in ways that they can relate back to their own technical practices.

Airport Tracking System — a sketch of an interface for a fictional system that automatically detects and flags “suspicious people” by color-coding people in surveillance camera footage.

A third theme that we found was that participants discussed and compared multiple ways in which a design could be configured or implemented. Our designs tend to describe products’ functions but do not specify technical implementation details, allowing participants to imagine multiple implementations. For example, a participant looking at the fictional automatic airport tracking and flagging system discussed the privacy implication of two possible implementations: one where the system only identifies and flags people with a prior criminal history (which might create extra burdens for people who have already served their time for a crime and have been released from prison); and one where the system uses behavioral predictors to try to identify “suspicious” behavior (which might go against a notion of “innocent until proven guilty”). The designs were useful at provoking conversations about the privacy and values implications of different design decisions.

Thinking About Privacy and Social Values Implications of Technologies

This work provides a case study showing how design workbooks and speculative design can be useful for thinking about the social values implications of technology, particularly privacy. In the time since we’ve made these designs, some (sometimes eerily) similar technologies have been developed or released, such as workers at a Swedish company embedding RFID chips in their hands, or Logitech’s Circle Camera.

But our design work isn’t meant to predict the future. Instead, what we tried to do is take some technologies that are emerging or on the near horizon, and think seriously about ways in which they might get adopted, or used and misused, or interact with existing social systems — such as the workplace, or government surveillance, or school systems. How might privacy and other values be at stake in those contexts and situations? We aim for for these designs to help shed light on the space of possibilities, in an effort to help technologists make more socially informed design decisions in the present.

We find it compelling that our design workbooks helped technologists-in-training discuss emerging technologies in relation to everyday, situated contexts. These workbooks don’t depict far off speculative science fiction with flying cars and spaceships. Rather they imagine future uses of technologies by having someone look at a product website, or a amazon.com page or an interface and thinking about the real and diverse ways in which people might experience those technology products. Using these techniques that focus on the potential adoptions and uses of emerging technologies in everyday contexts helps raise issues which might not be immediately obvious if we only think about positive social implications of technologies, and they also help surface issues that we might not see if we only think about social implications of technologies in terms of “worst case scenarios” or dystopias.

Paper Citation:

Richmond Y. Wong, Deirdre K. Mulligan, Ellen Van Wyk, James Pierce, and John Chuang. 2017. Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design Workbooks. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 1, CSCW, Article 111 (December 2017), 26 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3134746

This post is crossposted with the ACM CSCW Blog

by Richmond

Exploring Implications of Everyday Brain-Computer Interface Adoption through Design Fiction

This blog post is a version of a talk I gave at the 2018 ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) Conference based on a paper written with Nick Merrill and John Chuang, entitled When BCIs have APIs: Design Fictions of Everyday Brain-Computer Interface Adoption. Find out more on our project page, or download the paper: [PDF link] [ACM link]

In recent years, brain computer interfaces, or BCIs, have shifted from far-off science fiction, to medical research, to the realm of consumer-grade devices that can sense brainwaves and EEG signals. Brain computer interfaces have also featured more prominently in corporate and public imaginations, such as Elon Musk’s project that has been said to create a global shared brain, or fears that BCIs will result in thought control.

Most of these narratives and imaginings about BCIs tend to be utopian, or dystopian, imagining radical technological or social change. However, we instead aim to imagine futures that are not radically different from our own. In our project, we use design fiction to ask: how can we graft brain computer interfaces onto the everyday and mundane worlds we already live in? How can we explore how BCI uses, benefits, and labor practices may not be evenly distributed when they get adopted?

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by Richmond

Reflections on CSCW 2016

CSCW 2016 (ACM’s conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing) took place in San Francisco last month. I attended (my second time at this conference!), and it was wonderful meeting new and old colleagues alike. I thought I would share some reflections and highlights that I’ve had from this year’s proceedings.

Privacy

Many papers addressed issues of privacy from a number of perspectives. Bo Zhang and Heng Xu study how behavioral nudges can shift behavior toward more privacy-conscious actions, rather than merely providing greater information transparency and hoping users will make better decisions. A nudge showing users how often an app accesses phone permissions made users feel creepy, while a nudge showing other users’ behaviors reduced users’ privacy concerns and elevated their comfort. I think there may be value in studying the emotional experience of privacy (such as creepiness), in addition to traditional measurements of disclosure and comfort. To me, the paper suggests a further ethical question about the use of paternalistic measures in privacy. Given that nudges could affect users’ behaviors both positively and negatively toward an app, how should we make ethical decisions when designing nudges into systems?

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