Book ‘Teaching Design for Values’

Teaching Design for Values: Concepts, Tools & Practices

Ed. Roberto Rocco, Amy Thomas & María Novas Ferradás.

Delft: TU Delft Open, 2022.
DOI: 10.34641/mg.54.
ISBN: 978-94-6366-635-0.

The process of identifying, interpreting, and implementing societal values in university education is an essential part of responsible innovation and designing for equitable, inclusive, and sustainable societies. While there is now a well-defined and growing body of research on the theory and application of designing for values (or ‘value sensitive design’), at present the pedagogical dimension remains underexplored. Teaching Design for Values: A Companion is a resource for teachers of design-based disciplines who wish to foreground values more explicitly in their classes. With fourteen chapters written by both TU Delft educators and international contributors, the book aims to examine the concepts, methods and experiences of teaching design for values within a variety of fields, including urbanism, engineering, architecture, artificial intelligence and industrial design. Through its multi-disciplinarity, Teaching Design for Values proposes an expanded definition of ‘design’ to encompass a broad range of disciplines and processes that deal generally with ‘future-imagining’ and ‘futurebuilding’, including process management. In doing so it explores the ways that values may be expressed and analysed in a variety of different pedagogical contexts.

Table of Contents

Concepts

Design for Values & the City, by Taylor Stone

This paper undertakes a critical and constructive investigation into the applicability of value sensitive design (VSD) and design for values (DfV) methodologies for urban technologies, as a means to envision and enact responsible urban innovations. In particular, this paper focuses on the identification and analysis of values in urban technologies. First, an important methodological critique is highlighted, namely the vague articulation of ‘values’ in VSD and DfV discourse. Next, cities are characterised as open, dynamic, and evolving systems, with ‘urban technologies’ as co-shapers of this process. This highlights the unique conditions requiring attention in order to arrive at a robust understanding of the relationship between values and urban technologies. Finally, these insights are combined to propose and sketch six heuristic principles aimed at surfacing and analysing values in urban technologies, offering a refinement of value-sensitive methodologies for the context of urban technological innovation.

Design for Values, Value Sensitive Design, Responsible Urban Innovation, Philosophy of the City, Smart Cities, Night-time Lighting

This chapter investigates why a focus on justice should be included in planning and design education. The central argument, based on the ideas of moral philosopher Alasdair McIntyre, is that justice is a ‘internal and necessary good’ for the successful practise of spatial planning, without which it is meaningless. It contends that spatial planning can be publicly justified only if it produces (perceived) just outcomes using (perceived) just procedures. It challenges the notion that justice is solely a subjective feeling, arguing that various justice claims must be resolved through public communicative exercises, of which spatial planning is but one mani-festation. Although competing justice claims are frequently legitimate in and of themselves, they must be contrasted and evaluated against each other in context in order for justice claims to be appraised and some sort of agreed justice to be reached, albeit in imperfect ways, to ensure policy legitimacy, sustainability, and adherence. This chapter suggests four exercises to address communicative rationality and competing justice claims in the classroom, inviting students to argue their way through those claims from a variety of different perspectives.

Spatial Justice, Communicative Rationality, Public Reasoning

People experience a world designed for and by humans, but how much are designers aware of how our personal beliefs shape our professional choices? and simultaneously how do the world communities we live in design our beliefs? This chapter situates diverse professional design practises within critical decolonial reflection and is an invitation to unpack Western hegemony that has taken our planet to the brink. Decoloniality praxis and theory opens doors to consider a plurality of perspectives including those that originate from the Global South, and questions the neutrality of the Western model of thinking. Decolonising requires each of us to ask ourselves questions about our daily practises in our professional careers, to build our ‘conscientização’. We propose thinking about our ‘Design Stories’ as expressions of our values to redesign for the whole web of life.

Decoloniality, Conscientização, Complexity Thinking

Teaching design for values for artificial intelligence (AI) has attained certain urgency, with reports of algorithms that spread conspiracy theories, perpetuate biases on gender, and stigmatise people of colour. The ethical discussions regarding this technology tend to be philosophical or sociological, and only rarely manage to inspire those who are actually shaping this technology.This contribution aims to explore some ethical questions regarding the design of AI. It is suggested that, rather than autonomous behaviour, the transition from classical machines can be found in the enormous capabilities of AI to process and classify labels and categories. These are externally provided by human users, and therefore give a superficial idea of human-like intelligence. The resulting expose on the man-machine divide may offer a more sobering account on the promises, risks, and threats of AI than the hype often suggest.

Artificial Intelligence, Complexity Thinking, Man-machine Divide, Design for AI, Patterns

This chapter offers a sketch of how teaching ethics for engineering students at higher education levels could be improved. Today, engineering students are invariably introduced to the so-called ‘five-systems model’. This model presents them with different models of ethical evaluation (deontology, utilitarianism, virtue theory, care ethics, and the capability approach), showing how the application of different moral theories affects how we think about design dilemmas. Although introducing ethical discussion into the design education process is to be welcomed, the five-systems model is insufficient in its current form. Students often find it overly abstract and far removed from practical concerns, and there is also a danger it can precipitate relativism about values. This chapter provides the building blocks for a new approach by exploring how the notion of a moral exemplar can be used to give a concrete instantiation of values. Doing this allows students to grasp their own value systems and to share these with other designers in the educational environment.

Digital Well-being, Exemplars, Engineering Ethics, Fame, Celebrity

This chapter describes ‘Understanding Values’, a course that teaches aspiring designers who aim to design for values to disentangle how different notions of value and values influence the design process, the design outcome, and how the outcome is evaluated. The course strives to make abstract values more tangible by asking students to analyse the values supported or hindered by an existing product-service system and how it brings or destroys value for a broad range of direct and indirect stakeholders. Various theories, methods and tools are brought forward to help them perform their analysis and come up with a more acceptable alternative value proposition. Students are also encouraged to conduct high-quality dialogues to reflect on their own values as designers, the ethics of design and the value tensions they experience during the course. These reflections in turn serve as input for the development of their own code of ethics.

Human Values, Value as Worth, Value Tensions, Value Proposition, Ethics of Design

Tools

'The Practice of Taking a Position in the World': Designing manifesto workshops, by David Roberts

This chapter shares a manifesto workshop as a pedagogical tool to work through and work towards ethical built environment values. The paper is structured according to a series of exercises which invite students to: learn from diverse and divergent perspectives; develop a position towards them; formulate a critical reflection; draft their own declaration; and rework it into a collective response. At a time of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, systemic social injustices and growing inequalities, this workshop asks questions of built environment pedagogy and practice. As students progress through the workshop exercises, they negotiate and nurture concepts and approaches essential to developing ethical practice, from positionality and situatedness to reflexivity and relationality. To explicate these terms, I call upon the work of key thinkers D. Soyini Madison, Felicity Scott, Farhana Sultana and Penny Weiss alongside the Bartlett Ethics Commission led by Jane Rendell.

Ethics, Positionality, Situatedness, Reflexivity, Relationality

This chapter introduces and describes a pedagogical framework and resources supporting teachers in teaching for values in design. The pedagogical framework along with its teaching activities and resources was developed through the project Value Sensitive Design in Higher Education (VASE) to facilitate the development of knowledge, skills, and attitudes in students across the Humanities and Sciences that help them become more responsible designers. The VASE pedagogical framework is built around three core competency pillars reflecting the identified central dimensions involved in teaching for values in design: 1) Ethics and Values, 2) Designers and Stakeholders, 3) Technology and Design, and provides teachers with a curriculum compass, a collection of 28 teaching activities and 12 assessment activities. The chapter presents this work as an inspirational repository for all teachers to explore, experiment with and integrate in their teaching for values in design.

Pedagogical Framework, Teaching & Assessment Activities, Students as Responsible Designers, Pedagogical Design Patterns, Open Educational Resources

Architectural design may be defined as a synthesis of form, function, and technology, in a particular context, taking into account legal and financial preconditions. This book shows the need to also incorporate societal values. In the area of Corporate Real Estate Management (CREM) and Facilities Management (FM), a growing awareness comes to the fore, how buildings, facilities, and services can add value for clients, end-users, other stakeholders, and society as a whole. Adding value through well-thought design and management choices in the development of new buildings or interventions in buildings-in-use regards its contribution to the fulfilment of organisational objectives, end-user needs, interests of other stakeholders, and societal values. This chapter aims to connect both worlds by presenting findings from the CREM/FM field that may be incorporated in architectural design. It discusses twelve types of added value, possible conflicts and synergy between different values, and criteria for prioritisation. It also presents a step-by-step model to support value adding design and management processes. Incorporating societal values and values of clients and end-users is a prerequisite for socially responsible and user-centred design and management. Teaching students this way may help to provide a sustainable built environment that fits with people’s needs and interests. The chapter ends with some suggestions on how to teach value-sensitive design and management of buildings and facilities.

Corporate Real Estate, Facilities, User-centred, Societal Values, Priorities

This chapter presents the sociotechnical value map (STVM) as a method to map out values in a sociotechnical system. To identify these values, the publics that are or can be related to a given technology must be traced. The STVM combines elements from evolutionary theory of technology development and value sensitive design (VSD). It consists of the following steps: first, the relevant societal stakeholders are identified; second, VSD helps us design values into a technology. These findings allow us to reconstruct a sociotechnical public. The chapter examines the elements that make up a STVM, and its underlying theoretical considerations. It concludes by a short discussion on the benefits and shortcomings of the method, and on the reception of students.

Sociotechnical Value Map, Value Sensitive Design, Responsible Research and Innovation, Responsible Innovation System, Sociotechnical System

Practices

More than Half the Picture: Challenges at the encounter of feminism & architectural history, by Amy Thomas and María Novas Ferradás

Historically, the work of white Western male architects has dominated architectural history education. In recent decades a large body of scholarship has attempted to critically question this, highlighting and subverting mainstream disciplinary values, which are informed by gendered, racial, classist, and colonial biases. This chapter explores the process of addressing the methodologically and epistemologically gendered blind spots that reinforce structural inequality in the academy. We reflect on our experiences developing two interlinked Architectural History courses on the MSc Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences between 2019 and 2021 at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). The chapter explores the challenge of introducing traditionally marginalised forms of architectural knowledge – such as ones coming from feminist theory – within an existing institutional framework, while also interrogating the essential acts of collaboration between students, researchers, and teachers that take place in the process.

Architecture, Architectural History, Feminism, Gender bias, Seminar

Architectural redesign risks damaging or destroying built heritage, especially when designers are unaware of its cultural significance. This needs to be prevented, as built heritage is a human right, as coined by the 2005 Faro Convention. As a result, architects are now encouraged to conduct values-based redesigns with a broader range of stakeholders in order to uncover the cultural relevance of built heritage and co-create their redesigns. This shift in perspective, from one that was formerly expert-based and individualistic, aims to better preserve built heritage and its cultural relevance. Students, the architects of tomorrow, must acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitude to master this shift in perspective. This chapter reports on the lessons learned when teaching values-based redesign in gamified learning environments (GLEs) in two courses offered to architecture students by the Heritage and Architecture Section of the TUDelft, in the Netherlands. GLEs were chosen because of their known efficacy in enhancing stakeholder involvement and contributing to decision-making processes in other contexts. Results revealed that even if students are more aware of heritage value, their redesign decisions are more often guided by their personal values, rather than collective values (i.e. cultural significance). Values-based design and co-creation are not relevant for the redesign of built heritage only. The lessons learned in this research can help develop learning objectives across bachelor and master programs so that students learn to engage with different stakeholders in different contexts. Elsewhere, this new approach is being applied in practice, often without training. In this situation, training new architects on the use of GLEs as engagement tools contributes to their professional development, fostering a culture of greater participation and co-creation in urban planning, architecture and built heritage.

Gamified Learning Environment (GLE), Geogames, Values-based Redesign, Heritage Values and Attributes, Human Rights

The LINA Feminist Architecture Workshop is an innovative pedagogical experience in the field of architectural design education with a gender perspective. Based at the GADU programme -Gender, Architecture, Design and Urbanism- of the Institute of Human Spatiality of the University of Buenos Aires, LINA was taught in eight architecture schools in Argentina and Latin America in 2020. The article reflects on the androcentric bias that has historically guided architectural production and training. It outlines the philosophy of LINA and the didactic strategies of its three thematic laboratories: Registers + Women Architects dedicated to making visible the work of women in urban planning and architecture, (De)Constructed Architecture(s) in housing and gender and (Inter)Sectional Landscapes focused on public space. It analyzes the contribution of feminist educational approaches to create an architecture based on values of inclusion, equity and social participation.

Feminist Design, Architecture Education, Gender, Inclusion

This chapter addresses the formation of values through experiential learning and the incorporation of otherness in the subject Architectural Design IV, section 425, of the Architecture School of the University of Lima. The methodology and steps carried out within the practical teaching-learning process will be presented as a replicable good practice in order to raise awareness about the fundamental role that the user has in any architectural project. The course raises students’ awareness about the need to include a diversity of users (with and without disabilities), and about accessibility and the concept of universal design in the development of their design proposals. This methodology has been used since 2018. This chapter is part of the author’s doctoral research. It developed under a qualitative research paradigm using multiple observation techniques. The selected populations are students of the Architecture School of the University of Lima and the sample corresponds to the students enrolled in section 425 of the course Architectural Design IV. Depending on the cycle, there can be 12 or 24 students.

Architectural Education, Inclusion, Values in Education, Social Responsibility, Otherness

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