Designing for Human Values in an Urban Simulation System: Value Sensitive Design and Participatory Design
Citation
Borning, A., Friedman, B., & Kahn, P. (2004, January). Designing for human values in an urban simulation system: Value sensitive design and participatory design. In Proceedings From the Eighth Biennial Participatory Design Conference.
UrbanSim is a computer system that simulates how cities may grow and change over 20 years or more. It is designed to help local governments and community members better understand the long-term effects of different choices about transportation and land use issues. Community members often bring strongly held values to such decisions, for example regarding equity, sustainability, environmental protection, economic expansion, or property rights, and the decisions are often politically charged.
To make UrbanSim more useful for public decision-making, the designers are focusing on how the system reflects and respects the values of different people involved. They use an approach called Value Sensitive Design, which aims to build technology in a way that carefully considers human values throughout the design process. They also draw on ideas from Participatory Design, which emphasizes involving people directly in shaping the tools that affect them.
In this work, the authors explain how UrbanSim works and how these two design approaches are being applied. They also compare the strengths and differences of Value Sensitive Design and Participatory Design, using UrbanSim as an example. The goal is to improve how tools like UrbanSim support democratic discussion and help communities make better, more inclusive decisions about their future.
Abstract
UrbanSim is a large-scale simulation system that models the development of urban areas over periods of 20 or more years. Its purpose is to help citizens and local governments make more informed decisions about major transportation and land use issues, by projecting the long-term consequences of the different alternatives. Citizens often bring strongly held values to such decisions, for example regarding equity, sustainability, environmental protection, economic expansion, or property rights, and the decisions are often politically charged. To help shape the design of UrbanSim to better support the democratic process, as well as to be responsive to the values held by different stakeholders and the conflicts among them, we are using Value Sensitive Design, a theoretically grounded approach to the design of technology that seeks to account for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner throughout the design process. Participatory Design also has a good deal to say about these issues. Thus, in this paper, we first describe UrbanSim and Value Sensitive Design, and provide a snapshot of our ongoing work in this area. We then use the UrbanSim work as an example to bring out key commonalities and differences between Value Sensitive Design and Participatory Design, and to motivate some preliminary ideas about ways in which each methodology could evolve based on techniques and concepts from the other.