Design Across Cultures and Value Sensitive Design Lecture Notes

These flashcards cover key vocabulary and concepts from the lecture on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), focusing on Value Sensitive Design, political impacts of technology, and the gulfs of execution and evaluation.

Designing for change

The process of anticipating or responding to specific values through design, such as discouraging unhealthy habits like driving without a seatbelt.

Three goals of HCI

1. Help a user do a task. 2. Understand how a user does a task. 3. Change the way a user does a task.

Inherently political Technologies

Technologies that, due to their design, are only compatible with certain political structures; for example, nuclear power due to its inherent danger.

Technical arrangements as forms of order

Technologies used to achieve change in social order within a particular context for a particular purpose (e.g., Facebook or Twitter).

Robert Mosses plan for New York Parks

A $1900\text{'s}$ example of negative change by design where political motivation informed infrastructure design to create social impact.

Value sensitive design (VSD)

A design approach that seeks to provide theory and methods to account for human values in a principled and systematic manner throughout the design process.

The Right to be forgotten

A law in the European Union that allows individuals control over what information is available about them, which may conflict with the value of free speech in other countries.

Privacy by design

The practice of preserving the privacy of people and entities while designing useful and usable interfaces.

Direct stakeholders

People who use the system that is being created.

Indirect stakeholders

People who do not use the system but are affected by it.

The Gulf of execution

The difference between a user's goals (what they think they should do) and the actual actions they have to perform in the interface to accomplish those goals.

Feedforward

Information that helps a user predict what the result of an action will be before they perform it.

The Gulf of evaluation

The difficulty in assessing the state of the system and whether the user's actions successfully met their goals, often addressed by providing feedback.

Direct manipulation

An interaction method such as drag and drop or resizing that allows users to feel a direct interaction with the system.