When Batya Friedman and David Hendry published the original “Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination” in 2019, they laid the foundation for the theory and method of the design approach, outlining what value sensitive design is and reviewing its application across a wide range of projects. They illustrated how values can be integrated into technical design and offered theory and methods that stoked conversations across industries and disciplines.
And then readers wanted more.
Once the first edition was published, engineers, policymakers, and designers of all kinds soon asked for more on how to put value sensitive design into practice. So the Tech Policy Lab leaders – Friedman a Co-Director Emerita and Hendry a Faculty Associate – collaborated again on new work that gives readers the keys to successful implementation. The second edition, published in April, includes eight new hands-on instructional studios, 16 Envisioning Cards, five new methods and three new application domains. These interactive tools aim to catalyze imagination and encourage engagement with value sensitive design.
“The second edition tries to address this question of practice,” said Friedman, who is also Co-Director Emerita of the Value Sensitive Design Lab and a Professor Emerita at the Information School. “The book provides more examples of how value sensitive design has been taken up and utilized by others. And we include eight hands-on design studios that a person can actually use to develop their own skills practicing value sensitive design with a subset of the methods and with tools that are provided in the book.”
The design studios help connect value sensitive design with real-life scenarios by asking readers to observe and reflect on technology and human values in their everyday experience.
The studios encourage “carefully thinking about how some of our tools and technologies are disposed to certain kinds of values that we like and maybe are disposed to others that we’re not so keen on,” said Hendry, who is a Co-Director of the Value Sensitive Design Lab and an Associate Professor at the Information School. “For example, if you’re using [social platforms] in your daily activity, you can reflect upon that, but you can also do the same with a bicycle, or your commuting patterns, or a car that you’re driving, whatever that might happen to be.”
The Envisioning Cards, a value sensitive design toolkit, are incorporated throughout the design studios. The cards are organized by five envisioning criteria: stakeholders, time, values, pervasiveness and multi-lifespan. Together, these envisioning criteria help to bring forward the long-term and systemic impact of design. Each card has an image, a title, a theme and a short activity. For example, one card focuses on the idea that a single product can change hands many times during its life cycle, and asks the designer to generate a scenario around this transaction and what challenges may come of it.
“[The technology] may be passed among family members or across town. How might use of a system change as the technology changes hands?” Hendry said. “You can immediately imagine things like, well, we need to be careful about data, because if I’m changing devices, has my data been wiped, or … if it’s changing hands, is it useful to the person who’s receiving it, will they be able to use it in their life, and so forth.”
The new theoretical content includes two major elements: a more robust explication of the tripartite methodology, and clarification that value sensitive design is a formative theory.
“There were some scholars or design theorists who were trying to see value sensitive design as being a prescriptive theory, which it isn’t,” Friedman said. “So we clarify what is meant by a formative theory and what its strengths and limitations are, and why it is that value sensitive design takes that form. Part of the answer to that is the nature of design. When we build artifacts and put them out into the world, we have a limited amount of foreknowledge about how they will be appropriated. Systems with people are very organic, so the theory needs to be able to account for those kinds of conditions. It doesn’t mean that because you can’t be prescriptive you can’t provide insights and guidance.”
Since its introduction, value sensitive design has been adopted across an estimated 25 areas, including education, business, government and nonprofits. And that only continues to grow, alongside changes in culture and technology. The new publication includes a section on computing systems, with cutting-edge material including data statements work from Friedman and Faculty Associate Emily Bender, and research from Co-Director Aylin Caliskan on identifying bias in language systems.
And with continued growth there is always a need to evolve.
“We’re far more skillful and knowledgeable as designers and engineers than we were 30 years ago when I first started,” Friedman said. “But now we need to understand how we can parlay that to actually shape engineering practice and engineering technologies, both from how we train young engineers to what kinds of criteria and standards are developed to how we get large companies and practices to self-regulate in appropriate ways.”
RESOURCES
Value Sensitive Design Lab: https://vsdesign.org/
“Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination” 2026: https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/6119/Value-Sensitive-DesignShaping-Technology-with
“Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination” 2019: https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4328/Value-Sensitive-DesignShaping-Technology-with
Designing for Human Values: Ready, Test, Go podcast episode 43