[Sci-tech-public] MIT Media Lab colloquium . Batya Friedman . Designing Information Systems for Human Values . Monday, May 5 4pm

[Judith Donath]

MIT Media Lab Colloquium series presents:

Batya Friedman
University of Washington
Cultivating Moral and Technical Imagination:
A Toolkit to Design for Human Values in Information Systems

Monday May 5, 2008
Wiesner Room (2nd floor)
4:00-5:30 pm

http://smg.media.mit.edu/colloquium/

Abstract:
Tool use is a fundamental part of the human condition. In turn, our 
tools shape how we experience and interact with the world - what 
Winograd and Flores refer to as "our ways of being." Arguably, in the 
21st century information tools more than any other type have the 
potential to transform human experience, including what we value most as 
human beings. At stake is nothing less than what it means to trust, live 
with dignity, engage in public life, and experience privacy and 
intimacy. Those who design information systems have much to contribute here.

In our work in the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab we have been 
engaging these and related questions for close to two decades. My goal 
with this talk is to share key aspects of the Value Sensitive Design 
approach, methods, and design tools. First, I will discuss the 
interaction among information systems, adaptation, and human values 
through three projects involving privacy: one about users' views and 
values about privacy in public both in the United States and in Sweden; 
one on the design of a groupware system to balance privacy, reputation, 
and awareness; and one on the development of an open source license to 
provide privacy protections. My discussion will highlight value 
sensitive design methods that involve indirect stakeholder analyses, 
value dams and flows, co-evolution of technology and organizational 
policy, and the integration of informed consent and threat models. In 
the second part of the talk, I will turn to the challenge of envisioning 
longer-term implications for human values in the design of future 
systems. I will briefly describe the Envisioning Cards toolkit for use 
in design research, practice and education, and a new research agenda 
that engages multi-lifespan information system design.

Bio:
Batya Friedman is a Professor in the Information School and an Adjunct 
Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the 
University of Washington where she directs the Value Sensitive Design 
Research Lab. She received both her BA (1979) and Ph.D. (1988) from the 
University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Friedman's research interests 
include human-computer interaction, especially human values in design, 
social and cultural aspects of information systems, and design 
methodology. Her 1997 edited volume (Cambridge University Press) is 
titled Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology. Her work on 
Value Sensitive Design has focused on the values of informed consent, 
privacy in public, trust, freedom from bias, moral agency, environmental 
sustainability, and human dignity; and engaged such technologies as web 
browsers, large-screen displays, urban simulation, robotics, open-source 
code bases, and location-enhanced computing. She is currently working on 
value sensitive tools for envisioning and multi-lifespan HCI.

http://projects.ischool.washington.edu/vsd/index.html