values in design
What does it mean to design technologies for the home?
Where are we, as a field, in the area of domestic design?
As a field, we have learned that communication is
important in the home, so we design communication technologies. We also know
that technology can be applied to aid older adults age in place, so we
design aging-in-place technologies.
But designing technologies for homes is difficult. Why? Because the values that motivate what is important in
the domestic environment are not the values that are traditionally
associated with technology or the values that we have traditionally designed
to support.
If, indeed, domestic design is difficult because the
values undergirding the culture of use are different, then we must address
those values – though they be broad, perhaps unwieldy, and certainly hard to
evaluate – straight on. We must foreground them in design.
We have spent considerable time trying to understand holistically the
relationships between values and the domestic design space. We have
dovetailed numerous iterations of a data collection technique, our
values-centric version of Cultural Probes, with variations in design
processes that foreground values.
We are also performing a series of design ‘experiments’ in an attempt to
understand the utility of values in exploring and challenging the
boundaries of the domestic design space.
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people
Amy Voida [amyvoida@cc.gatech.edu]
Elizabeth D. Mynatt [mynatt@cc.gatech.edu]
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funding
This project is funded by the AHRI |
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publications
Voida, A. & Mynatt, E.D. (2005). "Conveying user values between
families and designers." In Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on
Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005; Portland, Oregon). New
York: ACM Press, pp. 2013-2016.
Voida, A & Mynatt, Elizabeth D.
(2002). "Grounding design in values." A position paper for the workshop on New
Technologies for Families at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems (CHI 2002). Minneapolis, Minnesota. [pdf]
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