Value-sensitive design practices for frugal innovations

Abstract

This chapter focuses on technological innovation and how insights from technological design can be used to address the challenges associated with the setting in which frugal innovation operates. The resource-constrained setting of frugal innovation puts high demands on the design requirements of frugal innovation technologies and the possible conflicts between these requirements. Within the ethics of technology, there is a growing literature that explicitly focuses on how to make technological design more sensitive to important moral values, commonly referred to as value-sensitive design or design for values. However, despite strong commonalities, frugal innovation does not feature as a strong application domain in the literature on value-sensitive design practices. For value-sensitive design practices to contribute to frugal innovation, it seems better to think in terms of ‘design for context X’ rather than ‘design for value X’. Systematic research on design practices is necessary to gain more insight into which values are particularly relevant.