Values as Hypotheses: Design, Inquiry, and the Service of Values

Abstract

Values: A Problem of Practice The question of the relationship of design and values has sparked much scholarship during the past 30 years. These investigations have led to the growing consensus that design is not a neutral activity; rather, it is value-laden: design is laden with, or bears, values. Despite substantial agreement that design is value-laden, significant variation arises in understanding how and why design bears values.1 Some scholars argue that artifacts act to determine what is possible and impossible in human engagements with the world—that is, products bear consequences that affect what we value in human life and living.2 Others note that products, broadly conceived, bear the conscious and unconscious intentions, values, and politics of the individuals and corporations that designed them.3 Some scholars propose that designed products bear the preferences and values of those who use them,4 while others view values as ideals, and design bears the burden of approximating an ideal.5 Others speak of products as embodying values, as valuebearing material expression.6 Others emphasize the capacity of designers and publics to give voice to values, to contest and argue for what should be valued; here, values are born and borne in argument.7 None of these positions offers a definitive, settled, or uncontested account of the relation of design and values. This scholarship, however, has led to calls for practitioners to explicitly address values in their everyday design practice. Values-oriented practitioners not only are faced with a variety of theoretical understandings; they also regularly encounter the empirical fact that a given value (e.g., autonomy) can be both valuable and not valuable in its participation in design products and practices. Batya Friedman provides a useful example that illustrates this problem. She describes a situation in which a new computer workstation, designed to support speech input and multimedia, includes a built-in, always-on microphone. When a user of this workstation wishes to have a conversation that is not recorded, she must go through multiple steps to turn off the microphone—a cumbersome solution. Out of this case, Friedman explores the concept of autonomy, she asks: 1 For a thorough scholarly explication of the history of ethics and design from a European perspective see, Anna Valtonen, “Back and Forth with Ethics in Product Development—A History of Ethical Responsibility as a Design Driver in Europe” (presentation, Conference of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM), CergyPontoise, France, October 13, 2006). 2 Bruno Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 225–58. 3 Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for the Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19–39. 4 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1st edition, Annette Lavers, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972); cf. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957). 5 Victor J. Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). 6 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (Boston: August Media, 2001). 7 Carl DiSalvo, Adversarial Design (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012).