Developing Tools to Counteract and Prevent Suicide Bomber Incidents: A Case Study in Value Sensitive Design

Abstract

Developers and designers make all sorts of moral decisions throughout an innovation project. In this article, we describe how teams of developers and designers engaged with ethics in the early phases of innovation based on case studies in the SUBCOP project (SUBCOP stands for ‘SUicide Bomber COunteraction and Prevention’). For that purpose, Value Sensitive Design (VSD) will be used as a reference. Specifically, we focus on the following two research questions: How can researchers/developers learn about users’ perspectives and values during the innovation process? and How can researchers/developers take into account these values, and related design criteria, in their decision-making during the innovation process? Based on a case study of several innovation processes in this project, we conclude the researchers/developers involved are able to do something similar to VSD (without them knowing about VSD or calling it ‘VSD’), supported by relatively simple exercises in the project, e.g., meetings with potential end-users and discussions with members of the Ethical Advisory Board of the project. Furthermore, we also found—possibly somewhat counterintuitively—that a commercial, with its focus on understanding and satisfying customers’ needs, can promote VSD.

AWOSE - A Process Model for Incorporating Ethical Analyses in Agile Systems Engineering

“…Arguably the most well-known approach that aims at tackling these issues is the Value-Sensitive Design (VSD) methodology (Friedman et al 2008), which has been applied in more or less structured ways in many projects (e.g. Friedman et al 2008;van den Hoven et al 2015;Royakkers and Steen 2017;Umbrello and De Bellis 2018). VSD is presented as a tripartite methodology comprising three types of value-related "investigations" (conceptual, empirical, and technical), which "overlap and intertwine so that boundaries between them are blurred" (Davis and Nathan 2015, p. 32).…”

Slow Innovation: the need for reflexivity in Responsible Innovation (RI)

“…I've worked for some 20 years in technology and innovation projects, in various roles; as researcher, designer, consultant, and project manager. I've practiced and advocated Human-Centred Design (HCD) (Steen 2012), where researchers and designers put potential users' experiences centre stage in their projects, Participatory Design (PD) (Steen 2013b), where project team members collaborate with potential users, throughout a project's iterative phases, and Value-Sensitive Design (VSD) (Steen and Van de Poel 2012;Royakkers and Steen 2017;Hayes, van de Poel, and Steen 2020), which entails organizing a process in which stakeholders express their values and integrating these in the project; with special interests in the ethics inherent in design practices (Steen 2015) and in organizing innovation processes that aim to promote wellbeing (Steen 2016).…”