Communications - July 2011

Figure 2. Designer Mary Flanagan’s reconceptualized classic Atari video games with giant joystick; http://www.maryflanagan.com/giant-joystick.

around VID, or Values in Design (or
more formally, Values in the Design
of Information Systems and Technol-
ogy). It consists of researchers and
practitioners in computer science,
engineering, human-computer in-
teraction, science and technology
studies, anthropology, communica-
tions, law, philosophy, information
science, and art and design. They
find common ground through the in-
terdisciplinarity implied by the broad
spectrum of interests. Decades of re-
search in the sociology of science and
technology have shown that technical
infrastructures reveal human values
most often through counterpro-
ductivity, tension, or failure. Work-
shops conducted over the past six
years by Helen Nissenbaum, Geof-
frey Bowker, and Susan Leigh Star
have sparked conversations among
people in these fields, producing a
cohort of interdisciplinary schol-
ars of values in design. This group
departs from a traditional view of
critical theory that tackles technol-
ogy once it is in place, and focuses
instead on socio-technical design
with values as a critical component
in the design process. The objective
of VID is to create infrastructures
that produce less friction over values
than those created in the past. This
objective is timely given the rise of
social computing and networks,
games that address social problems
and change (see http://www.gamesfor-
change.org/) and the interconnection
of corporate, government, and aca-
demic institutions’ interests ranging
from the individual to the transglobal.
Inclusion of GPS capability creates
new opportunities regarding informa-
tion tied to geography. Mobile appli-
cations coupled to social networks al-
low users to know when they are near
friends. Loopt and FourSquareb show
where friends have “checked in” and
their distances from a user’s current
location to facilitate social gathering
and serendipitous meeting. However,
such technologies can cause tension
in social values as the benefit of po-
tential meetings with friends causes
problems of attention and interroga-
tion, as when a paramour says, “You
said you were going to the store, then
the library, and then home, but you
never checked in. Where were you?” a

GPS-based network applications may increase locational accountability because, unlike a phone call that might originate anywhere, GPS-enabled applications carry information about specific geographic location. In principle, a user can work around “ stalking” and other problematic situations with some mobile apps such as Tall Tales and Google Latitudec that allow a user to lie about location, but equating privacy with lying creates its own values-centric problems. An “open hand” of location-based transparency can easily become a “backhand” when

b With over 4 million and 6.5 million registered
users as of February 2011, respectively; see
http://about.loopt.com/tag/loopt/ and http://
foursquare.com/about.
c http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tall-tales-
geolocation-spoofing/; http://mashable.
com/2009/02/04/google-latitude/; http://www.
androidzoom.com/android_applications/
fake%20locations
geographic privacy and autonomy are
compromised.

Another good example of value clashes concerns search engines. Google might be the greatest information retrieval tool in world history, but it falls prey to the “Matthew effect” named for a line in the Gospel of Matthew (25:29): “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” The results of a simple Google search on the word “Cameroon” shown in Figure 1 indicate Wikipedia, the CIA, the U.S. State Department, and the BBC seem to know more about Cameroon than any of its inhabitants. The highest-ranked site from the country does not appear until page 4, a link to the country’s main newspaper. Given that most users never go beyond the first few links,d few will get to information about Cameroon from Cameroon. The country is officially French-speaking, so sophisticated searchers might find better results searching for “Cameroun,” but few English-speaking users would do this. The algorithm that provides nearly universal access to knowledge also unwittingly suppresses knowledge of African countries. Or is this always unwitting? A search on “Obamacare” produces a taxpayer-paid-for link to http:// www.healthcare.gov as a top hit.1