Communications - July 2011

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ACM
Transactions on

Accessible Computing

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This quarterly publication is a quarterly journal that publishes refereed articles addressing issues of computing as it impacts the lives of people with disabilities. The journal will be of particular interest to SIGACCESS members and delegrates to its affiliated conference (i.e., ASSETS), as well as other international accessibility conferences.

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VID aims to create a new field that understands values and technology in the early stages of design.

The VID program depends on having sensible definitions for the terms “values” and “design.” The philosopher of science Jacob Metcalf provides a useful framing for “values” by comparing it with generally well-understood concept of ethics. Ethics are a set of prescriptions (nouns), while values are tied to action (verbs). VID is a call to action, an effort in ”verbing” design work by practical exercises. Exercises include background readings in computer and information science and information policy literatures. Exercises also include use of Mary Flanagan’s Values at Play cards to modify or create new values-driven computer games, or Batya Friedman’s Envisioning cards to reveal social sensitivities during the design process.e Workshop groups are split into interdisciplinary teams that produce a values-driven design in about one week. Academics and industry experts judge the proposals, which have ranged from a system to support community gardening projects and green space development, to a geocach-ing system that reveals the geographic routes by which kidnapped women are trafficked into the sex trade.

Conclusion
The VID effort has been under way
for 15 years since first articulated, 2–4
and for six years at building the cadre
of scholars through workshops. Next
steps are to open the design space
through collaborative interdisciplinary
work; in contrast to customary univer-
sity training that teaches how to work
individually. The world demands skills
in collaboration, and future designers
must work in highly connected and
intellectually fertile environments.
The VID community sees design as a
process in which constraints impose
new directions for innovation, and
values are a source of constraints. The
VID community is rethinking design
to go beyond user studies, marketing,
documentation, programming, and
e http://www.valuesatplay.org/?page_id=6 and
Friedman, B., Nathan, L. P., Kane, S., and Lin,
J. Envisioning Cards. Value Sensitive Design Re-
search Lab. The Information School, Univer-
sity of Washington. Seattle, WA, 2011; http://
www.envisioningcards.com

Design must be
integrated in ways
that challenge
assumptions about
what can and cannot
be changed.

implementation to actual engagement where the rubber truly hits the road. Design must be integrated in ways that challenge assumptions about what can and cannot be changed. A newly forming Center for Values in Design at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences will explore and apply these ideas as they emerge (see http://vid.pitt.edu/).

To close, consider the work of theorist, artist, and designer Mary Flanagan (see http://www.maryflanagan.com/giant-joystick). She has reconceptualized classic Atari video games by replacing the single-user, joystick-and-fire button control with a 10-foot high mechanism that requires collaboration and coordination among several people to operate the game (see Figure 2). She subverts design by taking a nontraditional perspective that produces radical reinterpretations of everyday practice. She shows that the social values of collaboration, cooperation, coordination, and play can transform a taken-for-granted utility, the simple joystick, into an opportunity for engagement and discourse about the design of information technologies.

References

1. Diaz, a. through the google goggles: sociopolitical bias in search engine design. In Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. a. spink and M. Zimmer, eds., springer new york, 2008.

2. flanagan, M., howe, D., and nissenbaum, h. Values in Design: Theory and Practice. Working Paper, 2005.

3. friedman, B., and nissenbaum, h. Bias in computer systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 14, 3 (1996), 330–347.

4. sengers, P., Boehner, k., David, s., and kay, J. reflective design. In Proceedings of the 4th Decennial ACM Conference on Critical Computing. (2005).