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.
.
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.
.
Recent Project News
Call for participation for workshop on ‘Corpus Analysis, Conceptual Change, and Socially Disruptive Technologies’
This workshop aims to establish a community of philosophers and cognitive scientists who are interested in using corpus linguistics to investigate concept and value change in light of conceptually disruptive technologies. There is a limited number of open slots...
NWO take-off grant for further development of ValueMonitor
Ibo van de Poel and Tristan de Wildt have received a NWO take-off grant, allowing them to further develop ValueMonitor. ValueMonitor is a text-mining tool that can systematically identify gaps among values in technologies voiced in society, policy, and research and...
Call for participation for workshop on ‘ValueMonitor, a tool for empirical investigations of values and value change in text corpora’
We invite you to a one-day workshop to get familiarized with ValueMonitor. ValueMonitor is an easy-to-use tool for empirical investigations of values and value change in text corpora (e.g., scientific articles, newspaper articles). It will take place on March 10th, 2023, from 9.30 to 16.30, in Delft. The number of places for the workshop is limited to ensure that we can help you effectively with the usage of the tool. Registration closes on January 20th and can be done by sending an email to ValueMonitor@valuechange.eu.
Set-up of the project
Research Lines
Within our project we pursue six research lines:
