Reflecting Human Values in the Digital Age

Reflecting Human Values in the Digital Age

By Abigail Sellen, Yvonne Rogers, Richard Harper, and Tom Rodden

Communications of the ACM | march 2009 | vol. 52 | no. 3

The article explains how recent changes in technology and how we use technology makes us question about HCI's goals, how should it approach them and if its current methods are still relevant.

They mention how HCI started as an activity "to model a user’s interaction with a desktop computer so that the interface between person and machine could be optimized".  Then during the 1990s, "the objectives of HCI began changing along with the growth of communication networks that link computers. Researchers started asking how users, with the aid of computers, might interact with each other". This led to HCI to become an academic discipline by its own.

Today, HCI is a multidisciplinary subject, "taking into account not just how technology might be functional or useful but also how it might provoke, engage, disturb, or delight".

One interesting note is their statement that HCI specialists "need to be astutely aware of how one set of design choices might highlight certain values at the expense of others".

They also talk about five major transformations that have redefined the way we interact with technology today. "The first transformation—the end of interface stability—has to do with how computers can no longer be defined by reference to a single interface but rather by many different interfaces or, alternatively, none at all."

"A second transformation, the growth of techno-dependency, refers to the fact that changes in how we live with and use technology have resulted in our becoming ever more reliant on it."

"A third transformation is the growth in hyperconnectivity, the influential role of communication technologies in tying us together in ways that were unimaginable even as recently as 10 years ago", "...our heightened ability to be in touch is equaled by a passion to capture more and more information

about people’s lives and actions—information that hitherto would have been discarded or forgotten."

The fifth transformation "—the growth of creative engagement—underscores the fact that flexible computer tools, which can be assembled and appropriated in new ways, allows us to see the world

in wholly new ways too."

The authors then provide some possible solutions for HCI to address these transformations. One of them is "to extend the  ways in which user-centered research and design are conducted by explicitly

addressing human values".

They mention that "a simplified but helpful model of current practice is that projects typically follow an iterative cycle, comprised of four fundamental stages, in which HCI specialists sequentially study, design, build, and evaluate technology with users".

Also, they say that "Key here is that the analysis should not just take into account people’s interactions with computer technology but also with the environment, with everyday objects, with other human beings, and with the changing landscape that the “new tech” brings to their world".

And finally that "HCI must also take into account the truly human element, conceptualizing “users” as embodied individuals who have desires and concerns and who function within a social, economic, and political ecology".