Award Talk: Batya Friedman, Something of Value -
Special EventsAbstract » Tools and technology do not stand apart from human values. Moreover, our tools, interactions, and infrastructures are tied intimately to human flourishing. In this SIGCHI Social Impact Award talk, I seek to inspire the CHI community to engage with socially significant issues. This talk will be a combination of personal reflections on building theory and method over a 20-year period, and a synthesis of core framings in value sensitive design. Along the way, I will dwell on method, examining roughly a dozen value sensitive design methods that taken as a whole can help researchers and designers account for human values in their technical endeavors. In so doing, I will expand the HCI design space beyond technical devices to infrastructure, policy, and social norms. Key to my discussion will be attention to the challenges of scale – across time, geography, cultures, and stakeholders. From method, I will make the turn to multi-lifespan information system design and concentrate my talk on the first project under that program – the Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal which supports peace-building and reconciliation in the aftermath of widespread violence. I will close this talk with openings: open questions in value sensitive and multi-lifespan information system design; and, more broadly, open challenges for the HCI community as we imagine the tools, interactions, and infrastructures that will underlie the futures of societies. We set our sights on progress, not perfection.
Biography Batya Friedman is a Professor in the Information School, Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington where she directs the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab. Batya pioneered value sensitive design (VSD), an approach to account for human values in the design of information systems. First developed in human-computer interaction, VSD has since been used in information management, human-robotic interaction, computer security, civil engineering, applied philosophy, and land use and transportation. Her work has focused on a wide range of values, some include privacy in public, trust, freedom from bias, moral agency, sustainability, safety, calmness, freedom of expression, and human dignity; along with a range of technologies such as web browsers, urban simulation, robotics, open source tools, mobile computing, implantable medical devices, computer security, ubiquitous computing and computing infrastructure. She is currently working on multi-lifespan information system design and on methods for envisioning – new ideas for leveraging information systems to shape our futures. Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal is an early project in this multi-lifespan information system design program. Batya received both her B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.