Design can always be considered to address certain values. Design of mobile phones, forks, trousers or cars will all concern global humane values, sustainability, compassion, humility, social equality, intrinsic values... Even if the designers themselves did not explicitly address this.
When people use the designed artefacts, their own experiences and daily concerns can make them reflect on the design. For example, I could reflect on what kind of social equality the production of my jeans involves, or what kind of social equality or intrinsic values I address or experience when wearing them. Further, a female interactive agent acting as a customer-support on a web-page, such as Anna at IKEA, represents a "designed" woman. Such agents may mirror values in the current society, leading to a design that embody the designers stereotyped view of a female customer-support worker.
Values can also be hidden in our society. Our culture serves as our everyday filter, where our own perspective of values can disappear in a daily routine that we do not reflect upon. Further, our values are probably highly contextualized and vary in different settings, cultures, and our day to day mood.
Read more about value-sensitive design in HCI (Human Computer Interaction), Interactions article, ACM, written by Batya Friedman.
Wednesday, 17 October 2007
Tuesday, 2 October 2007
Remake
Stockholms Stadsmission is a non-profit organization which sell secondhand gifts, such as cloths, furniture, books and other things, and the money goes to social work for homeless and young people in the Stockholm area.
A small experiment has now turned into a new cool brand; Remake. The idea involves to "remake" second hand gifts to make them more easy to sell. This is not like a traditional furniture renovation, where things are given a new color or fabric as a "facelift". Rather, this is about giving old furniture and clothes an entirely new appearance, grounded in creative artistic talents, with the ability to "see" new aesthetic potentials in old things. For example, an old wooden kitchen chair may appear, not with a new color, but with a varnish on top of a fashionable fabric. This also results in that such chairs, which before were hard to almost give a way for free, now can be sold for over 1000 swedish kronor (100 euro). Currently the brand has two different directions; remake furniture and remake clothing.
A small experiment has now turned into a new cool brand; Remake. The idea involves to "remake" second hand gifts to make them more easy to sell. This is not like a traditional furniture renovation, where things are given a new color or fabric as a "facelift". Rather, this is about giving old furniture and clothes an entirely new appearance, grounded in creative artistic talents, with the ability to "see" new aesthetic potentials in old things. For example, an old wooden kitchen chair may appear, not with a new color, but with a varnish on top of a fashionable fabric. This also results in that such chairs, which before were hard to almost give a way for free, now can be sold for over 1000 swedish kronor (100 euro). Currently the brand has two different directions; remake furniture and remake clothing.
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