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Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination
Using our moral and technical imaginations to create responsible theory, method, and applications for value sensitive design.Implantable medical devices and human dignity. Private and secure access to information. Engineering projects that transform the Earth. Multigenerational information systems for international justice. How should designers, engineers, architects, policy makers, and others design such technology? Who should be involved and what values are implicated? In Value Sensitive Design, Batya Friedman and David Hendry describe how both moral and technical imagination can be brought to bear on the design of technology. With value sensitive design, under development for more than two decades, Friedman and Hendry bring together theory, methods, and applications for a design process that engages human values at every stage.
After presenting the theoretical foundations of value sensitive design, which lead to a deep rethinking of technical design, Friedman and Hendry explain seventeen methods, including stakeholder analysis, value scenarios, and multilifespan timelines. Following this, experts from ten application domains report on value sensitive design practice. Finally, Friedman and Hendry explore such open questions as the need for deeper investigation of indirect stakeholders and further method development.
This definitive account of the state of the art in value sensitive design is an essential resource for designers and researchers working in academia and industry, students in design and computer science, and anyone working at the intersection of technology and society.
After presenting the theoretical foundations of value sensitive design, which lead to a deep rethinking of technical design, Friedman and Hendry explain seventeen methods, including stakeholder analysis, value scenarios, and multilifespan timelines. Following this, experts from ten application domains report on value sensitive design practice. Finally, Friedman and Hendry explore such open questions as the need for deeper investigation of indirect stakeholders and further method development.
This definitive account of the state of the art in value sensitive design is an essential resource for designers and researchers working in academia and industry, students in design and computer science, and anyone working at the intersection of technology and society.
299 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 28, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 24, 2021
In the interests of fair disclosure, MIT Press allowed me to access an evaluation copy of this book.
Batya Friedman is one of the key pioneers in Value Sensitive Design (VSD), so I had high expectations for this 2019 book. After reading through it for the first time, I admit I was disappointed. I was hoping for something along the lines of Sarah Spiekermann’s Ethical IT Innovation: A Value-Based System Design Approach (2016) but appeared to hold in my hands a survey of research on Value Sensitive Design. I then proceeded to reread the book, focusing on the bits that had drawn my attention on my first reading and reappraised my first evaluation -this was definitely not the book I had hoped for, but it is a valuable work all the same.
Friedman and Hendry go over key papers on VSD and provide the reader with an excellent and very honest research survey on the state of the art in VSD, an obligatory reference text for any researcher interested in the area.
After an introduction briefly describing VSD and its precedents, the book is divided into three chapters one on theory, one on methods and one on applications. Friedman and Hendry appear to analyze the key works to tease out theory, extract methods used or review the applications. A final chapter entitled “Conclusion” wraps up the book in traditional rhetorical style.
Some readers may find this approach repetitive, since sometimes exactly the same material, down to the same sentences, appears in the chapter on theory, twice in the chapter on methods and once again in the chapter on applications.
The chapter on theory focuses on direct and indirect stakeholder identification and analysis, a brief overview of human values covered in VSD papers, value tensions, the need to adopt an interactional stance, the tripartite investigation methodology covering value analysis, distinguishing between the conceptual investigation of a value (what is value X key concepts required to understand it), its empirical investigation (how people and groups use and assess it in practice) and the technical investigation of how a technology can provide affordances or obstacles for the value), the need to design technology in a wider context that includes its social embedding (co-evolving technology and social structure or norms), multi-lifespan design and the design principle of progress, not perfection.
The chapter on method describes 17 methods, many of which are taken or adapted from social science research, which have been found useful in VSD. These include stakeholder analysis, value source analysis, value-oriented semi-structured interviews, ethnographical inquiry on technology and society, , value dams and flows, multi-lifespan co-design, and Envisioning Cards, one of the few methods specifically developed for VSD. A dozen or so somewhat fuzzy but readable heuristics or strategies round off the chapter.
The chapter on applications describes ten “application domains”. While it might be debatable whether some of them are domains and others applications, they are all interesting and provide an excellent, ample and thought-provoking view on VSD.
If you are at all interested in value oriented design, this is a key reference book you should keep handy,
Batya Friedman is one of the key pioneers in Value Sensitive Design (VSD), so I had high expectations for this 2019 book. After reading through it for the first time, I admit I was disappointed. I was hoping for something along the lines of Sarah Spiekermann’s Ethical IT Innovation: A Value-Based System Design Approach (2016) but appeared to hold in my hands a survey of research on Value Sensitive Design. I then proceeded to reread the book, focusing on the bits that had drawn my attention on my first reading and reappraised my first evaluation -this was definitely not the book I had hoped for, but it is a valuable work all the same.
Friedman and Hendry go over key papers on VSD and provide the reader with an excellent and very honest research survey on the state of the art in VSD, an obligatory reference text for any researcher interested in the area.
After an introduction briefly describing VSD and its precedents, the book is divided into three chapters one on theory, one on methods and one on applications. Friedman and Hendry appear to analyze the key works to tease out theory, extract methods used or review the applications. A final chapter entitled “Conclusion” wraps up the book in traditional rhetorical style.
Some readers may find this approach repetitive, since sometimes exactly the same material, down to the same sentences, appears in the chapter on theory, twice in the chapter on methods and once again in the chapter on applications.
The chapter on theory focuses on direct and indirect stakeholder identification and analysis, a brief overview of human values covered in VSD papers, value tensions, the need to adopt an interactional stance, the tripartite investigation methodology covering value analysis, distinguishing between the conceptual investigation of a value (what is value X key concepts required to understand it), its empirical investigation (how people and groups use and assess it in practice) and the technical investigation of how a technology can provide affordances or obstacles for the value), the need to design technology in a wider context that includes its social embedding (co-evolving technology and social structure or norms), multi-lifespan design and the design principle of progress, not perfection.
The chapter on method describes 17 methods, many of which are taken or adapted from social science research, which have been found useful in VSD. These include stakeholder analysis, value source analysis, value-oriented semi-structured interviews, ethnographical inquiry on technology and society, , value dams and flows, multi-lifespan co-design, and Envisioning Cards, one of the few methods specifically developed for VSD. A dozen or so somewhat fuzzy but readable heuristics or strategies round off the chapter.
The chapter on applications describes ten “application domains”. While it might be debatable whether some of them are domains and others applications, they are all interesting and provide an excellent, ample and thought-provoking view on VSD.
If you are at all interested in value oriented design, this is a key reference book you should keep handy,
May 30, 2023
“Technology and human experience are together, with one shaping the other. In this mutual shaping, we observe that neither moves forward on its own, nor is technology value-neutral. Thus, design process matters. For researchers, designers, and engineers, at stake is nothing less than human dignity and just societies. As we strive to make progress in technical design and innovation, we need not require perfection, but commitment to practice—and through practice, progress.”
November 4, 2019
I draw on this theory for my thesis. Good reference material. Interesting for anyone that is interested in building value into designs
July 13, 2025
A deserved contemporary classic in the field. One of the most complete and comprehensive treatments of how to do technology design that accounts for people’s values that I know of. When teaching this stuff, regardless of the technology in question, I keep returning to this work. One of the things that sets it apart for me is how it manages to straddle both design research and design practice in a way that is mutually reinforcing. The only shortcomings that I see is that the technical component of the methodology is somewhat underdeveloped compared to the conceptual and empirical parts. But this is understandable given its commitment to technology agnosticism. Furthermore, it could do with an update in terms of the projects it surveys as examples of the practice. These nitpicks aside, I would say the first two chapters, introducing the notion of value sensitive design, and its theoretical foundations in a concise and lucid manner, are required reading for anyone doing or teaching or researching technology design today.
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