Timelines: A World-Building Activity for Values Advocacy

Document Title

Timelines: A World-Building Activity for Values Advocacy

Document Information

• Subject Area: Ethics and Value Design in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
• Keywords: Value Design, Values Advocacy, Design Fiction, Ethics, Value Work, Scenario Planning, Reflective Design, Technological Practice

Research Background and Problem

• Problem and Challenges: The authors focus on the frequent neglect of values and ethical issues in technological development and practice. Existing tools often lack the ability to integrate value issues with specific practical scenarios. Traditional methods of ethical discussion based on hypotheticals or dilemmas (e.g., "the trolley problem") fail to effectively explore large-scale societal changes brought about by technology and their impact on individual micro-level experiences.

• Importance of the Problem: As technology becomes increasingly embedded in daily life, its design, use, and maintenance can have profound impacts on social values and ethics (e.g., privacy concerns, algorithmic bias). Enhancing awareness and recognition of ethical and value-related issues in technology is a pressing need for technological development.

• Research Motivation and Related Work:

  • Existing research includes methods such as "Value Sensitive Design" and various tools and roles (e.g., "ethics officers") aimed at integrating ethical thinking into technological practice.
  • In the HCI field, design fiction and scenario planning have been used to explore ethical issues and societal consequences of emerging technologies. However, these approaches are often limited to the perspectives of specific researchers or designers.
  • The authors propose the need for a more lightweight and accessible design activity that provides opportunities for participants from diverse backgrounds (e.g., students, academics, technology practitioners) to reflect on technology and values.

Solution

• Method and Solution: The authors propose a design activity called "Timelines," aimed at helping value advocates guide participants in discussing technology and ethical issues, thereby fostering multidimensional reflection.

• Innovative Features:

  • Integrates multiple design concepts (e.g., design fiction, value sensitive design, scenario planning) while analyzing the societal impact of technology on both micro (individual or group experiences) and macro (societal change) scales.
  • Utilizes accessible formats such as news headlines and social media posts to engage and assist non-experts in reflecting on complex normative and ethical issues.
  • Provides a flexible activity structure adaptable to various contexts and participant types.

• Implementation Steps:

  1. Select Technology and Context: Participants choose a technology or system to discuss, along with its societal use case.
  2. Generate Stakeholders: Identify direct and indirect stakeholders of the technology, such as users, policymakers, and third parties.
  3. Create News Headlines: Headlines can be positive or negative, depicting future societal events or impacts of the technology.
  4. Build Timeline Stories: Place the headlines on a timeline board to create multiple juxtaposed narratives about the evolution of the technology.
  5. Generate Social Media Content: Simulate posts from different stakeholders’ perspectives to reflect individual feelings about the technology.
  6. Share and Reflect: Discuss insights gained during the activity and their connections to real-world scenarios.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Outcomes:

  • Developed and validated a systematic yet easy-to-implement method that guides participants in analyzing ethical issues of technology from multiple perspectives and levels.
  • Provided experimental examples showing that participants can recognize the complex impacts of technology on values and engage in interdisciplinary, multi-role reflection.

• Advantages Compared to Existing Solutions:

  • Emphasizes engaging participants through lightweight and familiar frameworks (e.g., news headlines, social media posts) to lower barriers to entry.
  • Combines the "open-world building" aspect of design fiction with the "systemic effect analysis" of scenario planning, enabling the integration of micro-level experiences with macro-level effects.

• Experimental Results:

  • Participants in the experimental activity were able to analyze the impact of technology on values from multiple stakeholder perspectives, generating numerous critical viewpoints.
  • The timeline and social media-based approach successfully helped participants connect technological issues with societal contexts, fostering multidimensional reflection.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Limitations:
    • Timelines primarily focus on future scenarios and do not sufficiently address the historical construction of technology and value issues.
    • The activity relies on the guidance of value advocates, requiring additional labor and financial support.
  • Future Directions:
    • Explore how Timelines can be adapted to different scales and formats in educational, corporate, or research settings.
    • Consider modifying Timelines to focus on the historical context of technology or critique the economic logic of existing technological frameworks.
    • Further integrate other tools (e.g., "value cards") to enhance the activity’s effectiveness and operational content.

Conclusion

Timelines is a feasible and flexible tool that helps value advocates guide participants in understanding ethical and value-related issues in technology design and use. Through simple formats like news headlines and social media posts, as well as the integration of micro and macro levels, Timelines aims to provide a reflective space for a wide range of technology practitioners and researchers to discuss the long-term societal impacts of technology design. This work not only contributes to advancing technology ethics education but also offers new ideas for policymaking, corporate training, and value-oriented research.