Designing for Changing Values
How to Deal with Value Change in Sociotechnical System Design
Not value neutral
A key insight from philosophy of technology is that technological artifacts and sociotechnical systems are not value neutral, but support or inhibit certain values. Several philosophical accounts for understanding the embedding of values in technological artifacts have been proposed and approaches like Value Sensitive Design, Design for Values and Responsible Innovation have been established for integrating values into technical design.
A theoretical blind spot
A blind spot is, however, the possibility of value change after a sociotechnical system has been designed. For example, when many of our current energy and transportation systems were designed sustainability was not yet a central value, and we are now struggling to incorporate this value into these systems. Progress in the field is currently inhibited by the lack of a philosophical theory of value change in sociotechnical systems.
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Better design strategies
This project fills the gap by developing such a theory. It moves beyond the state of the art by proposing a dynamic rather than a static account of values, by developing insights in the dynamics of value change, by extending analysis about the embedding of values in technical artefacts to sociotechnical systems and by developing design strategies that aim at designing sociotechnical systems that can better deal with value change.
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Recent Project News
‘Explaining Value Change’ – Project Workshop
The Value Change team is organizing an international online workshop series on Explaining Value Change. On multiple dates in April and May 2021, international experts will discuss fundamental questions regarding our understanding of the phenomenon of value change....
A Value Change Panel at the Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations Conference
Several members of ValueChange team, together with a colleague from TU/e Eindhoven organized a Value Change panel at the International Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations Conference at University of Twente, the Netherlands, November 5, 2020. Panel Description...
Value Change in Action: Fairphone
In this series of post, we present examples of the relationship between changing values and changes in technologies, innovations and designs. These are not cases that we investigate in-depth in our project, but they do give you an idea of the relevance of our...
Set-up of the project
Research Lines
Within our project we pursue six research lines:
