Design for values and conceptual engineering

Politicians and engineers are increasingly realizing that values are important in the development of technological artefacts. What is often overlooked is that different conceptualizations of these abstract values lead to different design-requirements. For example, designing social media platforms for deliberative democracy sets us up for...

Estimating Value Preferences in a Hybrid Participatory System

We propose methods for an AI agent to estimate the value preferences of individuals in a hybrid participatory system, considering a setting where participants make choices and provide textual motivations for those choices. We focus on situations where there is a conflict between participants' choices and motivations, and operationalize the...

Introduction to the special issue: value sensitive design: charting the next decade

In this article, we introduce the Special Issue, Value Sensitive Design: Charting the Next Decade, which arose from a week-long workshop hosted by Lorentz Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, November 14–18, 2016. Forty-one researchers and designers, ranging in seniority from doctoral students to full professors, from Australia, Europe, and North...

Eight grand challenges for value sensitive design from the 2016 Lorentz workshop

In this article, we report on eight grand challenges for value sensitive design, which were developed at a one-week workshop, Value Sensitive Design: Charting the Next Decade, Lorentz Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, November 14–18, 2016. A grand challenge is a substantial problem, opportunity, or question that motives sustained research and...

Autonomous Shipping Systems: Designing for Safety, Control and Responsibility

The future of value sensitive design

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...

Improving Confidence in the Estimation of Values and Norms

Autonomous agents (AA) will increasingly be interacting with us in our daily lives. While we want the benefits attached to AAs, it is essential that their behavior is aligned with our values and norms. Hence, an AA will need to estimate the values and norms of the humans it interacts with, which is not a straightforward task when solely...

Designing for human rights in AI

In the age of Big Data, companies and governments are increasingly using algorithms to inform hiring decisions, employee management, policing, credit scoring, insurance pricing, and many more aspects of our lives. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can help us make evidence-driven, efficient decisions, but can also confront us with unjustified...

Meaningful Human Control Over Autonomous Systems: A Philosophical Account

Debates on lethal autonomous weapon systems have proliferated in the past 5 years. Ethical concerns have been voiced about a possible raise in the number of wrongs and crimes in military operations and about the creation of a “responsibility gap” for harms caused by these systems. To address these concerns, the principle of “meaningful human...

Digital Twins in Health Care: Ethical Implications of an Emerging Engineering Paradigm

Personalized medicine uses fine grained information on individual persons, to pinpoint deviations from the normal. ‘Digital Twins’ in engineering provide a conceptual framework to analyze these emerging data-driven health care practices, as well as their conceptual and ethical implications for therapy, preventative care and human enhancement....

Stakeholder values and platform wars: smart meters in the Netherlands

The interconnected nature of the different components of smart grids is a prime example of complexity in technological systems. Developing such systems is highly dependent on the wishes and needs of end-users and other stakeholders. We argue that stakeholder values should be taken into consideration during the design and standardisation of...