I’m Richmond Wong, a postdoc at the UC Berkeley Center for long Term Cybersecurity. And I’m
Tonya Nguyen, a PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Our paper introduces
Timelines, an accessible, low barrier-to-entry design activity that facilitators can use
to help participants think about technologies, social values, and ethics. The activity primarily
uses the creation of news headlines and social media posts to create and explore possible
worlds.
The activity design is motivated by the problem that researchers, industry practitioners,
and educators are increasingly looking for new ways to help their colleagues notice and
discuss social values and ethical concerns as relevant to their technical practice.
We were inspired by multiple approaches to values in design, including: values and ethics
advocates, value sensitive design, design fiction, and scenario planning. We also conducted
background interviews with UX professionals who act as values and ethics advocates. They
expressed a need for tools to help educate their colleagues about the relevance of values
to their work. While a lot of existing work focuses on creating values interventions within
the design process, we designed Timelines to be an activity that can occur outside of
the design process.
A skilled facilitator, like a values advocate or educator, can use it to engage their colleagues.
We designed Timelines to be lightweight in terms of materials -- using things like a
white board, index cards, and sticky notes. We used an iterative approach where we playtested
multiple versions in different settings.
We’ll quickly walk through the activity steps.
First, participants choose (or are provided) a technical artifact and social context that
they will be exploring.
Second, Participants generate a range of direct and indirect stakeholders, drawing on value
sensitive design. This is done early on as we found that this works as a good brainstorming
warm up activity.
Third, participants generate a range of news headlines depicting how the artifact gets
adopted, appropriated, and contested in multiple ways.
Fourth, participants group their headlines into chains that create different stories,
drawing on design fiction practices. They place these on what we call the Timelines
triangle. Inspired by the futures cone, the “present” is represented at the narrow
point on the left, while multiple futures are suggested as the triangle broadens. This
temporal aspect helps participants think about secondary and tertiary effects of their artifact,
and consider multiple ways in which the artifact might get adopted and appropriated.
Fifth, participants return to their stakeholders from earlier. Participants create social media
posts from the perspectives of different stakeholders experiencing the events depicted in the headlines.
This then leads to a general group discussion.
We’ll briefly mention a couple important reflections, though the paper provides a more
detailed discussion.
Using familiar forms like news headlines and social media posts are ways to make the design
activity approachable to a broader range of people. The activity’s seeming simplicity
is intentional to try to allow Timelines to be used in a range of settings - such as classrooms,
workshops, research groups, or product teams.
However, the activity foregrounds several important ways of thinking about values and
ethics. We highlight to participants that seemingly divergent or conflicting stories
of adoption and use can happen in the same world at the same time, reflecting that the
same technologies can be used in multiple and unintended ways.
We also try to steer people away from creating completely utopian or dystopian worlds, by
creating stories involving both positive and negative headlines. The focus is on more complex,
and sometimes conflicting experiences that arise in everyday use.
The news headlines depict changes that happen at scale, helping explore possible worlds
at a macro-level. While the social media posts are rooted in more micro-level everyday situated
experiences. Together, this reflects how the experience of values and ethics is affected
both by broad shared large-scale infrastructures, as well as by local situated conditions.
We note that Timelines is partial as a design intervention. Our experience facilitating
Timelines leads us to recognize the importance of the facilitator in helping prompt participants
to reflect. Timelines is designed to be used in situations where there’s a skilled facilitator.
While the paper is based on our experiences facilitating the activity, future work might
investigate how others might facilitate it.
Thank you to our colleagues, the reviewers, and our participants. You can find the activity
resources, facilitation guides, and the paper at tinyurl.com/TLactivity