Ideologically-Embedded Design: Community, collaboration and artefact

Highlights

• Overview of approaches on roles of values in design process.

• Proposal of the concept of ideology in design.

• Focus on the community level in design.

• Explore the roles of ideology and future research directions.

Abstract

Values in design have been studied in HCI research as additional design criteria, in the Value Sensitive Design (VSD) approach, and as foundations of the design approach itself, in Participatory Design (PD). In both cases, values are seen as properties of individuals, groups and society. This paper introduces the Ideologically-Embedded Design (IED) approach that situates values on the intermediary level of analysis of communities. IED is illustrated by the analysis of two case studies of communities, the online epistemic community Wikipedia and the socio-technical system of cohousing projects. In each case, the attendant value systems are described, together with the way that they operate with respect to the co-design process and the design artefact, which corresponds to the community designing itself. The role of systems of values in decision-making and artefact design is discussed. In conclusion, approaches to supporting IED are outlined.

Introduction

Design of civic systems, e-democracy, and more generally the engagement of citizens in co-design are becoming key issues in HCI research. Whereas it is now well established that design is a process of negotiating amongst disciplines and that design of artefacts is socially-embedded, the consequences of opening up the design process, e.g. by engaging citizens in co-design, are not yet well defined. The main obstacles to involving citizens in design have been mostly linked to favouring effective collaboration (e.g. establishing common ground), as well as representational issues. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the question of taking values into account in design — particularly in co-design and participatory design (PD) — has become an important issue.

Recent research in HCI has taken “values” into account, in the design of systems, in two main ways: Value-Sensitive Design (VSD) and Participatory Design (PD).

In the first approach (VSD), unitary values (such as “privacy”) are mostly considered as additional criteria to be satisfied by the designed artefact (i.e. in addition to criteria such as usability, economy and æsthetics). The unitary values themselves are ‘inherited’ from the societal level (for example, the value of “transparency” relates to governmental initiatives); and different individual co-designers, working together in groups, may adhere to alternative, conflicting values, to be negotiated. In sum, values have been seen as additional, discrete, design criteria, to be taken into account in the design of artefacts, on individual (designer), group (co-designer) and societal levels.

In the second approach (PD), the attendant vision of the design process per se embodies values, such as freedom of participation, voice for all and democracy, in bringing together experts and citizens having alternative forms of expertise. Here, values are again associated to the (co-designer) group, but more specifically with respect to the (collaborative) processes by which it is supposed to function.

To summarise: values have been considered, in VSD and PD, as discrete criteria, on the levels of society, individuals and groups, and in terms of the latter, with respect to its participants and cooperative processes.

Our approach complements and extends existing approaches to considering values in HCI and design research in two ways:

(1) We take values into account as ensembles, in systems (or more or less coherent and tightly linked associations of ideas) that we term ideologies. As will be reiterated below, we do not understand ideologies as necessarily dogmatic and/or irrational, but simply — and in terms of the literal meaning of the word (“idea”-“logos”) — as systems of values. Thus, for example, the “open” movement embodies an ideology comprising related values of transparency, democracy, freedom, commitment, engagement, etc.

(2) We address values in terms of a social organisation that is intermediary between the group (perhaps congregated for a single project), the individual co-design participants, and society from which values are inherited, i.e. the community. We term our approach “Ideologically-Embedded Design” (IED). A community is literally a group of people bound together by some ‘thing’ held in common. What is held in common can be, literally, a ‘thing’, such as shared land or buildings; but usually that is not enough. Historically, communities have also been bound together by shared origins, value systems, or ideologies (clear examples would be religious communities in the early years of the American state, or else kibbutz in Israel). As we shall describe, more recent examples of “communitarianism” include online communities such as “Python” or even Wikipedia. Although the latter is characterised by the aim of achieving “neutrality of point of view”, which may appear anti-ideological, we argue that this is nevertheless an ideology (a value system) in that it groups together values of openness, globalisation and neutrality, expressed in explicit rules for the way in which the community should function.

It might be thought that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of totalitarian ideological systems (such as Fascism, Communism) in the aftermath of the Second World War, that modern society is less ideological. We argue that this is not so: the ideological plane has simply been displaced, towards, for example, religious fanaticism, an ideology of “absolute transparency” (cf. Wikileaks), or even globalisation, that propounds a form of ethical relativism (ideas and values of every culture are equally valid) or else universalism (“The Rights of Man”). As we stated above, such value systems are not necessarily dogmatic: what is important is simply that they are in fact systems (or at least assemblages) of values. In the rest of this paper we describe how modern ideologies are played out and impact on societal areas of co-design of epistemic or socio-technical artefacts, such as Wikipedia and cohousing projects.

The IED approach is more or less salient depending on the nature of the object of design (what is being designed) and its relation to the designers and projected users. We discuss cases where the object of design, the designers and projected users are intimately linked, in the sense that the object of design can be the community of designers itself, with its more or less explicit rules embodying values. Thus, a case discussed below is that of a co-housing project or community, with its tangible shared resources and rules for cooperating and living together: the future ‘users’ (those who will live in the cohousing community), the design participants and the object of design are the same. On a societal level, cohousing relates on one hand to community values, such as sharing, and also to ecology; but it can also relate to a different ideology, that of reducing costs and efficiency in use of resources. Such ideologies are what bind communities together (or else, in the case of opposed ideologies, may lead them to disintegrate) and are implemented by their rules for sharing and living together.

In presenting the IED approach, we will cross the frontiers of design in HCI, by extending the literature review to design of epistemic artefacts, to collaboration in epistemic communities, as well as to the field of argumentation theory (see van Eemeren et al. 1996). The Ideologically-Embedded Design approach will be illustrated by examples from studies of design of artefacts (knowledge objects and socio-technical systems) in two cases: (i) Wikipedia articles; (ii) co-design of social-technical artefacts such as participatory housing (cohousing). In these examples, systems of values act as collaborative principles, objects of the co-design debates as well as forming the ‘cement’ of the participants’ groups. In conclusion, we discuss research issues aiming at the understanding and support of the processes of ideologically-based design.