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1. Analyzing Value Discovery in Design Decisions Through Ethicography

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300307  

   Chivukula, Shruthi Sai; Gray, Colin M.; Brier, Jason A. (May 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '19)

   HCI scholarship is increasingly concerned with the ethical impact of socio-technical systems. Current theoretically driven approaches that engage with ethics generally prescribe only abstract approaches by which designers might consider values in the design process. However, there is little guidance on methods that promote value discovery, which might lead to more specific examples of relevant values in specific design contexts. In this paper, we elaborate a method for value discovery, identifying how values impact the designer's decision making. We demonstrate the use of this method, called Ethicography, in describing value discovery and use throughout the design process. We present analysis of design activity by user experience (UX) design students in two lab protocol conditions, describing specific human values that designers considered for each task, and visualizing the interplay of these values. We identify opportunities for further research, using the Ethicograph method to illustrate value discovery and translation into design solutions. 

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2. MobiSweep: Exploring Spatial Design Ideation Using a Smartphone as a Hand-held Reference Plane

   https://doi.org/10.1145/2839462.2839490  

   Vinayak, Devarajan Ramanujan (February 2016, TEI '16 Proceedings of the TEI '16: Tenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction)

   In this paper, we explore quick 3D shape composition during early-phase spatial design ideation. Our approach is to re-purpose a smartphone as a hand-held reference plane for creating, modifying, and manipulating 3D sweep surfaces. We implemented MobiSweep, a prototype application to explore a new design space of constrained spatial interactions that combine direct orientation control with indirect position control via well-established multi-touch gestures. MobiSweep leverages kinesthetically aware interactions for the creation of a sweep surface without explicit position tracking. The design concepts generated by users, in conjunction with their feedback, demonstrate the potential of such interactions in enabling spatial ideation. 

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3. What Kind of Work Do "Asshole Designers" Create? Describing Properties of Ethical Concern on Reddit

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395486  

   Gray, Colin M.; Chivukula, Shruthi Sai; Lee, Ahreum (July 2020, DIS '20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM on Designing Interactive Systems Conference)

   Design practitioners are increasingly engaged in describing ethical complexity in their everyday work, exemplified by concepts such as "dark patterns" and "dark UX." In parallel, researchers have shown how interactions and discourses in online communities allow access to the various dimensions of design complexity in practice. In this paper, we conducted a content analysis of the subreddit "/r/assholedesign," identifying how users on Reddit engage in conversation about ethical concerns. We identify what types of artifacts are shared, and the salient ethical concerns that community members link with "asshole" behaviors. Based on our analysis, we propose properties that describe "asshole designers," both distinct and in relation to dark patterns, and point towards an anthropomorphization of ethics that foregrounds the inscription of designer's values into designed outcomes. We conclude with opportunities for further engagement with ethical complexity in online and offline contexts, stimulating ethics-focused conversations among social media users and design practitioners. 

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4. Cultural Context in Engineering Design: Exploring the Influence of Communication on Design Practices

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4068593  

   Marshall, Avery; Fu, Katherine (December 2025, Journal of Mechanical Design)

   Just as engineering designs can be uniquely created for different cultures around the world, engineers come from all over and view design through their own cultural lenses. Culture can impact how designers perceive themselves, their self-efficacy, and the way they interpret the design task at hand. Studies have shown that cultural values and behavior (i.e., cultural context) impact communication patterns, as well as learning strategies (Newman et al., 2017, “Psychological Safety: A Systematic Review of the Literature,” Hum. Resour. Manage. Rev., 27(3), pp. 521–535. 10.1016/j.hrmr.2017.01.001; Hirsch et al., 2001, “Engineering Design and Communication: The Case for Interdisciplinary Collaboration,” Int. J. Eng. Educ., 17(4/5), pp. 343–348). Halls' information processing continuum illuminates how some cultures communicate explicitly through written and spoken words (low context), while others communicate with a common awareness of nonverbal cues (high context) (Handford et al., 2019, “Which ‘Culture’? A Critical Analysis of Intercultural Communication in Engineering Education,” J. Eng. Educ., 108(2), pp. 161–177. 10.1002/jee.20254). Designers from low-context cultures are more comfortable in a low-context learning environment (e.g., with explicitly written instructions), whereas those from high-context cultures benefit more from face-to-face interactions (Goel and Pirolli, 1992, “The Structure of Design Problem Spaces,” Cogn. Sci., 16(3), pp. 395–429. 10.1207/s15516709cog1603_3). These communication differences impact cross-cultural collaboration within global companies and virtual teams. This study examined whether communicating a design task in a more engaging manner would impact solution quality and self-efficacy, particularly in light of the designer's culture and/or familiarity with the design problem. Engineering undergraduate students and professionals were recruited from each of 10 countries, including the United States, to complete a design task and respond to self-perception questions. Participants were presented with the design problem in one of two modes: written (low context) or video (high context). Results showed that delivery modality and cultural context did impact design solution quality and self-efficacy; however, differences were found between professionals and students. 

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5. Vision-Language Models for Design Concept Generation: An Actor–Critic Framework

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4067619  

   Ghasemi, Parisa; Moghaddam, Mohsen (September 2025, Journal of Mechanical Design)

   We introduce a novel actor-critic framework that utilizes vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) for design concept generation, particularly for producing a diverse array of innovative solutions to a given design problem. By leveraging the extensive data repositories and pattern recognition capabilities of these models, our framework achieves this goal through enabling iterative interactions between two VLM agents: an actor (i.e., concept generator) and a critic. The actor, a custom VLM (e.g., GPT-4) created using few-shot learning and fine-tuning techniques, generates initial design concepts that are improved iteratively based on guided feedback from the critic—a prompt-engineered LLM or a set of design-specific quantitative metrics. This process aims to optimize the generated concepts with respect to four metrics: novelty, feasibility, problem–solution relevancy, and variety. The framework incorporates both long-term and short-term memory models to examine how incorporating the history of interactions impacts decision-making and concept generation outcomes. We explored the efficacy of incorporating images alongside text in conveying design ideas within our actor–critic framework by experimenting with two mediums for the agents: vision language and language only. We extensively evaluated the framework through a case study using the AskNature dataset, comparing its performance against benchmarks such as GPT-4 and real-world biomimetic designs across various industrial examples. Our findings underscore the framework’s capability to iteratively refine and enhance the initial design concepts, achieving significant improvements across all metrics. We conclude by discussing the implications of the proposed framework for various design domains, along with its limitations and several directions for future research in this domain. 

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