Values in the Design of Information Systems and Technology

The roadbuilders cut a swathe through lovely Laguna Hills a few years back – it’s a bittersweet pleasure driving the toll road, because gosh it’s still beautiful and goshdarnit where roads are cut build-up follows.  So one morning I was driving down to San Diego from Irvine.  It was one of those thick foggy days where you seem to be driving through an ethereal landscape painted by Tanguy – praeternatural glimpses of ravines or hill tops within a swirling grey atmosphere, muted noise from the occasional fellow traveller.  So of course they put the toll booth in one of the foggiest areas, and I drifted through it without realizing.  Found out soon enough though – there was a fine in the mail the following week. 

Even when we think we are invisible (and believe me, on today’s Internet – everyone knows you are a dog), we are being tracked.  Some of the stories sound pretty harmless – the man who drove his Mercedes Benz in for a service only to be surrounded by eager engineers who said they’d never seen it being driven so fast (easy enough to do with GPS tracking).  Cell phones are being hailed as a liberatory technology for our kids – they are also being designed as electronic bracelets which allow parents to know where they are any time of night… .  Or there is the issue of targetting marketting to you on web sites based on your buying history and declared preferences.  Great in one sense – just yesterday Amazon niche-marketed me into buying a book on memory – but scary in another – a set of algorithms is building up a pretty good picture of who I am and how I spend my spare time and is using it in ways I wot not of.  There’s loads of folks interested in mining search terms that people use.  And a scary thing there is that with a couple of month’s search terms for a given user, and no other information, you’ve got a good chance of tracking them down (what kind of person searches for a hairdressing salon in Los Gatos, a Prius dealer in Santa Cruz, a dentist in Scott’s Valley … and so forth).  Information that we think is totally anonymised is not if you are good enough with data (in analog form, this is how the American government used anonymized census data to track down Japanese Americans for internship in the Second World War). 

Privacy is a nice headliner issue for understanding the role of values in computer and information sysystms design.  The new information and communication technologies we are creating are affecting our basic human values in ways we need to understand, talk about and design for.  We as a society need to think about what privacy means in the electronic age, and we need to be designing systems which reflect our commitments.   

There are a range of other issues, which I won’t go into in such detail.  But let’s run through a few others.  One great thing about the Web, we all like to believe, is that it’s a wonderful democratizing tool.  Now we can all get the world’s information at our fingertips.  But the Web, it turns out, is a much less friendly world for some than it used to be.  When I first began coding in HTML lo these many years, I learned that we should use <alt text> to code for text which would appear on the screen when a picture couldn’t load.  Then folks with minimal and expensive web access over slow modems could still get what they wanted.  Now that practice has gone out the door, programs like Flash don’t allow for it anyway and I can’t remember the last time I saw an interestting text-based browser (I”d love to be corrected on this).  Now this has two unintended but significant knock-on implications.  First of all, access to the web by the blind community has become way more difficult, since you can’t plug many sites into a reading program which would help them navigate.  Second, folks in the developing world who want to use cheap and available cell phones to access the web using voice commands and hearing automatic readouts of menu choices and items are being designed out of lots of great websites.   Another great thing about the Web is Google, which gets the world’s knowledge at your fingertips.  Another great democratizing tool.  And yet… .  Because of the nature of the algorithms – the Mathew Effect (to them that hath most links shall be given most priority) – the perverse effect is that information from many parts of the world is ghettoized.  As of today, the first four pages of my google search on Africa revealed just one web site that originated in Africa – though I did learn about doing a virtual safari….  I got depressed and didn’t go any further – but it’s somewhat moot anyway since most people don’t go past the first page. 

Now the point here is not to throw up your hands, but to say – wow, here’s an interesting design challenge.  The information is out there – and most ‘power users’ would know how to get access to it – but it’s not readily available to folks who don’t spend their waking lives massaging keyboards.  How do we design so that the true democratic potential is realized? 

Helen Nissenbaum and I are planning right now for our second graduate student workshop on values in the design of computer systems and technology – for some information on the first iteration see http://www.scu.edu/sts/VID/welcome.cfm.  We bring together a cohort of students from the range of discplines that we think needs to be round the table as we seek to impact the design world: computer scientists, information scientists, legal students, engineers and sociologists.  The first group we had was terrific – a few went on to work in the Yale Law School Internet Society Project (a must-visit place for work at the boundaries between design, the law and social justice); another put together a web start-up for not-for-profits grounded in part in the insights he got from attending.  Our goal is to develop an interdisciplinary academic community around these issues, to get them taught in universities across the country and to inflect the ways in which designers think about the importance of social values as they design ICT (much as we train all our biotechnology students in ethical issues around the use of stem cells…). 

We may still all end up being trapped in the fog and surprised by fines, but let’s hope we can design a better world.

Geof Bowker