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In this workshop, we seek to facilitate a shared understanding regarding the role of ethics and values in design practice and research, using this shared understanding to develop methods to investigate ethical decision-making. While existing study of ethics and values has largely focused on design methods for implementation in practice in an explicit and structured way (e.g., value-sensitive design, values at play), our focus is on the ways in which values might be discovered and generatively explored through qualitative and critical means, both by researchers and practitioners. Through collaborative activities and discussions, workshop participants will be engaged in analyzing existing design artifacts and processes, critiquing them through ethical lenses, and subsequently visualizing their process of value discovery. Outcomes from this workshop are expected to further deepen existing methods for uncovering ethics and values in a design process, highlighting potential opportunities for supporting practitioners’ work and ethical awareness.
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This content will become publicly available on August 3, 2026
Value-Centered Framing Supports Inclusive Idea Convergence in Participatory Civic Design
Collective decision-making in civic design contexts is often structured around surface-level consensus, such as idea popularity, which can obscure the diverse values that underlie community preferences. In this paper, we investigate how foregrounding shared values impacts the convergence phase of a community design process. We conducted a within-subjects experiment (n=24) using a design probe that simulates a civic decision-making task for a local recreational park. Participants engaged in three conditions, counterbalanced for order, that varied the extent to which personal values were identified before voting. Through surveys and interviews, we found that value conditions significantly increased participants’ sense of inclusion, alignment with community values, and willingness to compromise, without increasing perceived effort. Participants reported that value-centered framing helped them interpret others’ priorities, reflect on their own, and feel more connected to the broader community. These findings contribute to the design of civic technologies by demonstrating how lightweight value-centered scaffolding can support deeper deliberation, shared understanding, and more equitable public input.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2009003
- PAR ID:
- 10654071
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 139 to 149
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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