Hic sunt leones. User orientation as a design principle for emerging institutions on social media platforms

The phenomenon of missed interactions between online users is a specific issue occurring when users of different language games interact on social media platforms. We use the lens of institutional theory to analyze this phenomenon and argue that current online institutions will necessarily fail to regulate user interactions in a way that...

Gender Choices of Conversational Agent: How Today’s Practice Can Shape Tomorrow’s Values

When creating conversational agents, designers have to make decisions about the way the agents present themselves. In this position paper, we identify and synthesize ethical dilemmas that conversational interface designers and researchers face around gender of conversational agents. First, we identify three layers that cause tension in designing...

Legibility as a Design Principle: Surfacing Values in Sensing Technologies

This paper introduces the design principle of legibility as means to examine the epistemic and ethical conditions of sensing technologies. Emerging sensing technologies create new possibilities regarding what to measure, as well as how to analyze, interpret, and communicate said measurements. In doing so, they create ethical challenges for...

Understanding the values in the context of Wi-Fi access data

For data-intensive research, Wi-Fi access data has become an important source since it’s low-cost, convenient and rich in information. It is mainly used to study people’s movement and then used to infer individuals’ or a group of people’s behavior pattern. The application of the research result is also common. It could be used to do interior...

Game mechanics and technological mediation: an ethical perspective on the effects of MMORPG’s

In the past decades, video games have grown from a niche market to one of the major entertainment media, enticing millions of players worldwide. When ethical aspects of video games are being debated, the discussion oftentimes revolves around effects of their content, such as violence. This paper argues that effects of game mechanics, such as...