Lecture 2 - Value Sensitive Design ​

VSD is about giving people what they need, instead of what they want. It's about developing technologies that envision the well-being of everyone and the environment. It focuses on ethics and morality.

VSD is split into 4 criteria:

• Stakeholders: a designer has to think about how their software is going to affect direct stakeholders or indirect stakeholders.
  • the Waze effect: Waze started equally distributing traffic, which created traffic jams in residential neighborhoods. People who aren't directly involved with the app were suffering from the noise created by cars.
  • the electric wheelchair: a wheelchair that can climb up stairs was invented, being worldwide recognized and winning multiple awards. However, it's extremely expensive, requires the sitting person to have physical strength, the repair service is unclear... The wheelchair was designed for people with mobility problems, but is used only by a small sample of them.
  • the curb-cut effect: when designing for accessibility, the designer can end up benefiting people for whom it wasn't designed. For instance, curb-cuts help people with wheelchair, but also people who are pushing a stroller, people who are riding a bike...
• Time: what are the long term implications of the software?
  • what would be the impact in people's relationships with each other?
• Pervasiveness: what would happen if everyone turned out to use the software?
  • Elon Musk suspended Starlink support to Ukraine during the attack to Crimea. The justification is that "SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation." He gained the control of dictating the direction of a war due to the ubiquity of his technology.
• Values: the impact of the software on values.
  • value tensions: ban harmful content, or protect free speech? Sometimes, supporting one value is detrimental to another value.