Week 10: Artifacts, Interfaces, and Politics

• Notes Source

Do Artifacts Have Politics?

• Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? In Daedalus 109(1). (pp. 121-136). MIT Press.

Topic: the idea that artifacts can have politics.

What matters is not technologies itself buy the social or economic system in which it is embedded.

Two ways that artifacts contain political properties:

1. Instances in which the invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in a particular community
2. Cases of what can be called inherently political technologies, man-made systems that appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political relationships

The “industrial revolution” in the home: Household technology and social change in the 20 century

• Cowan, R. S. (1976). The “industrial revolution” in the home: Household technology and social change in the 20 century. Technology and Culture 17(1). (pp. 1-23). Johns Hopkins University Press.

Topic: technological revolution in our home and its impact.

Sociological model that predicts changing patterns of household work will be correlated with at least two indicators of social change:

1. The divorce rate
2. The rate of married women’s labor force participation

Author hypothesizes that the role of the advertiser is the connecting link between social change and technological change.

Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems

• Friedman, B., Kahn Jr, P. H., Borning, A., & Huldtgren, A. (2013). Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems. In P. Zhang & D. Galletta (Eds.) Human-Computer Interaction in Management Information Systems: Foundations. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.

Topic: introducing value sensitive design and developing the idea through three different studies:

1. Cookies and informed consent in web browsers
2. HDTV display technology in an office environment
3. User interactions and interface for an integrated land use, transportation, and environmental simulation

Our goal in this paper is to provide an account of Value Sensitive Design, with enough detail for other researchers and designers to critically examine and systematically build on this approach.

What is value sensitive design?

Value Sensitive Design is a theoretically grounded approach to the design of technology that accounts for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner throughout the design process.

What is a value in the HCI sense?

A value refers to what a person or group of people consider important in life.

Value sensitive design builds on an iterative methodology that integrates conceptual, empirical, and technical investigations.

Conceptual investigations:

• Who are the direct and indirect stakeholders affected by the design at hand?
• How are both classes of stakeholders affected?
• What values are implicated?
• How should we engage in trade-offs among competing values in the design, implementation, and use of information systems (e.g., autonomy vs. security, or anonymity vs. trust)?
• Should moral values (e.g., a right to privacy) have greater weight than, or even trump, non-moral values (e.g., aesthetic preferences)?

Empirical investigations - can be applied to any human activity that can be observed, measured, or documented.

Technical investigations - focus on how existing technological properties and underlying mechanisms support or hinder human values.

Cookies And Informed Consent In Web Browsers Case

Based on investigation results Mozilla developed new types of mechanisms:

1. Peripheral awareness of cookies
2. Just-in-time information about individual cookies and cookies in general
3. Just-in-time management of cookies

HDTV Display Technology In An Office Environment

More women than men expressed concern about the invasion of privacy through web cameras in public places. This finding held whether their image was to be displayed locally or in another city (Tokyo), or viewed by one person, thousands, or millions. One implication of this finding is that future technical designs and implementations of such display technologies need to be responsive to ways in which men and women might perceive potential harms differently.

User Interactions And Interface For An Integrated Land Use, Transportation, And Environmental Simulation

Using value sensitive design to investigate how a technology – an integrated land use, transportation, and environmental computer simulation – affects human values on both the individual and organizational levels; and how human values can continue to drive the technical investigations, including refining the simulation, data, and interaction mode.