Values in Design Council:
An End of Project Report
NSF Eager: Values in Design in the Future Internet Architecture, CNS/NetS 1058333
Helen Nissenbaum, Luke Stark, Malte Ziewitz
July 31, 2013
What happens when a multi-disciplinary team of social analysts joins highly trained computer scientists
and engineers to think about Future Internet Architectures (FIA)? This reports draws together
experiences and insights from the Values in Design (VID) Council, a three-year experiment in
collaboration between those who design and build technologies, and those who analyze their social,
legal, and ethical implications. Starting from the idea that all too often these two communities are not
sufficiently integrated, the project suggested a new model of interdisciplinary collaboration that aims to
structure and enhance interactions between technical and non-technical personnel where “the rubber
meets the road”. After briefly recalling the idea and motivation for the project (I.), we will provide a short
overview of participants (II.) and meetings (III.) and conclude with key observations (IV.) and lessons for
future engagement (V.).
I. The idea
For many decades, the National Science Foundation has supported research that integrates concerns
about the ethical and political implications of technology into scientific and engineering research. It has
done so through dedicated programs, such as Societal Dimensions of Engineering, Science, and
Technology, as well as programs primarily focused on specific scientific and engineering outcomes that
require the integration of selected social scientists, ethicists, or policy/legal analysts. However, both of
these approaches come with a number of difficulties. The first approach often produces work that is
abstracted (one step removed) from details of the technology involved and often couched in parochial
language that forms a barrier to outsiders; the second approach tends to be characterized by constraints
of timing, lack of mutual familiarity, and reward structures that neglect the shared contributions of both
technical and non-technical personnel.
This project therefore set out to support experimentation with a third approach, one that sought to
combine the best of these models while avoiding some of the pitfalls inherent in both. The goal was to
structure the interactions between technical and non-technical personnel at points in the design process
where “the rubber hit the road,” with researchers from both sides self-selecting according to their
interests in particular research problems.
At the heart of this effort was the Values in Design (VID) Council, a multi-disciplinary team of experts in
values-in-design who have worked alongside the four recipients of the National Science Foundation's
Future Internet Architecture Initiative (FIA) large projects grants. Council members served as analysts
and consultants to the FIA projects, helping to identify junctures in the design process in which values1
critical technical decisions arise; locating design parameters and variations that differentially call into play
relevant values; developing rich conceptual understandings of relevant values for and with each
respective projects; operationalizing values to enable transition from values conceptions into design
features alongside project investigators; examining the interplay of values embodied in design with
respective values embodied in law and policy with FIA investigators; and where possible, verifying values
in design through prototyping, user testing and other empirical analyses. These activities are all
components of Values-in-Design (VID), an approach to analyzing and designing technology (Friedman,
Kahn, and Borning, 2006; Flanagan, Howe, and Nissenbaum, 2007).
II. The participants
The Council featured a group of VID expert consultants from different “home” disciplines, including
sociology, law, information science, media studies, ethics, philosophy, and science & technology studies.
As a result of our recruiting efforts, the following researchers worked with research teams from the
various FIA projects:
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Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School
Geoffrey Bowker, Department of Information and Computer Science, UC Irvine
Finn Brunton, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU
Paul Dourish, Department of Information and Computer Science, UC Irvine
Batya Friedman, The Information School, University of Washington
Alexander Galloway, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU
Jacob Gaboury (RA), Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU
Tarleton Gillespie, Department of Communication, Cornell University
James Grimmelmann, University of Maryland Law School
Chris Hoofnagle, Center for Law & Technology, UC Berkeley
Deborah Johnson, Department of Science, Technology & Society, University of Virginia
Deirdre Mulligan, School of Information, UC Berkeley
Helen Nissenbaum (Principal Investigator), Department of Media, Culture, and Communication,
NYU
Paul Ohm, University of Colorado Law School, University of Colorado at Boulder
Phoebe Sengers, Department of Information Science and S&TS, Cornell University
Luke Stark (Research Assistant), Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU
Michael Zimmer, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
In addition, Katie Shilton (College of Information Studies, University of Maryland) participated as an ex
officio member.
III. The meetings
VID Council members were active participants in the FIA PI meetings held periodically over the three
years of the first round of the FIA project. At these meetings, Council members both engaged analytically
with the design decisions of the FIA technical teams, and built collaborative relationships with the
workshop participants.
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Introductory Meeting (November 15-16, 2010, Arlington, VA)
The introductory meeting in Arlington, Virginia consisted of presentations by each FIA group with time for
Q&A, and a series of panels, including one by the VID Council. Council members also led an informal,
lively discussion about the work of the VID Council after dinner of the first day. Overall the Council
enjoyed a positive reception. The meeting was fairly "big picture" in scope: the terms “architecture” and
“policy” were used a great deal by each of the groups but Council members noted that these seemed
somewhat under-defined, standing in for a variety of technical, legal, and social considerations. There
was also some discussion over the nature of the future internet as an international project, and on the
cultural terms by which these architectures are designed. Almost all the FIA technical teams were
interested in reversing the "dumb network" that they claimed was the outcome of our current "neutral"
end-to-end system. Moreover, all of the groups were interested in "trustworthy" computing; Council
members had a number of questions about how trust would be created operationally.
Meeting on Security and Privacy (May 25-26, 2011, Berkeley, CA)
While all of the projects were still in an early stage, the meeting in Berkeley was extremely encouraging
to Council members; several of the technical teams seemed receptive to the feedback of both VID
Council members and the outside security experts commissioned by the NSF to assess the projects.
Council members began to identify specific technical questions and concerns with individual
architectures. For instance, all of the projects incorporated local and transitory router caching of online
data as a means to heighten resilience against attack, path redundancy, and data transfer efficiency.
However, both the security experts and the VID Council were concerned that the proliferation of named
data stored on local routers opened new opportunities for tracking, surveillance and data mining by both
government and business actors at a scale beyond that possible in the current Internet.
From a values in design perspective, the VID Council expressed hope that all four projects would work to
ensure that privacy affordances were not simply treated as an optional "add on" to be incorporated, at
the request of and cost to the user. Moreover, the VID council and the outside security experts were
quick to express concern in what appeared to be an unstructured faith in the market as a means of
producing services, such as privacy, that many viewed as embodying values that should be deeply
embedded in each architecture. Finally, both VID Council members and the outside security experts
cautioned that the technical teams’ uniform reliance on cryptography as the backstop to the secure
elements of their architectures required more careful scrutiny.
Meeting on Deployability (April 19-20, 2012, Fort Collins, CO)
The meeting in Fort Collins was marked by an increasing sense of cooperation and dialogue between
VID Council members and the technical teams. The mood of the meeting was positive, with VID Council
members introducing the concept of real-world scenario planning as means of joint focus and analysis.
VID Council members asked a number of questions regarding the core assumptions each project made
about who their users might be, and how the structure of the information ecosystem of each design might
affect consumer choice. VID Council members also re-raised specific concerns regarding the ease of
online surveillance and tracking under the control assumptions of all of the projects. Council members
noted the importance of thinking through models of competition and regulation, including the propensity
of some of the project teams to assume horizontal and vertical integration by online service providers,
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and the prospect of a gap between user perceptions of issues like privacy and security controls vs. their
own technical capabilities. Council members highlighted the importance of bridging the gap between
what people (“everyday users”) feel about deployed technologies and the instincts and interests of
technologists and developers; and a need for awareness of groups of Internet users – including endusers and underserved communities – not well-served by commonplace narratives within the technical
community.
Meeting on Real-World Scenarios (October 1-2, 2012, Arlington, VA)
The meeting in Arlington was structured around a theme raised by VID Council members in Colorado:
how the various projects would engage with real-world scenarios and the messy complexities of use by
real people. The meeting began with “deep-dive” descriptions of each of the four projects presented by
outside experts not associated with each team. Each team was then asked to respond to a series of preplanned scenarios with an account of how their systems would differ in practice from the status quo.
There was considerable scope for VID input in terms of these real-world questions, with the use of
scenarios having been deployed by Council members at the April 2012 meeting. One important insight
gleaned from Council members was that all the FIA teams assumed a high degree of knowledge and
choice from their users; this assumption, familiar from economics as “rational actor theory,” could
potentially lead to the growth of highly specialized application and service “middlemen” to parse and
profit from the need to choose. Another broadly applicable point made by Council members was the
importance of carving out a digital “namespace” in which public goods and collective experiences could
thrive; the focus by many teams on unique name identifiers seems to assume a heavily privatized and
individualistic space for web content.
Meeting on Evaluation (March 18-19, 2013, Salt Lake City, UT)
The final PI meeting of the initial FIA funding cycle was focused on evaluation methods for the various
prototype networks now under development by the project teams, as well as further scenario-based
analysis. At the meeting, both the technical teams and VID Council members spent time discussing and
looking forward to the next round of funding opportunities. VID Council members raised some concerns
that the meeting agenda was packed and left little room for explicit focus on questions of broader sociotechnical significance. Moreover, some VID Council members expressed concern that embedding within
the project teams might be difficult in ensuing rounds of funding, and that an organized VID-focused
grant would be required to continue with the Council’s work. Council members left the meeting eager to
continue and expand their relationship with the FIA teams in the next round of FIA funding, and enthused
about maintaining and expanding the Council’s activities on this score.
IV. Key observations and difficulties
Based on these experiences it is possible to make a number of observations and identify difficulties
encountered during the project. Especially prominent were the ongoing negotiation of a shared language,
the diverging assumptions about the directions and capacities of research, and the practical limits to
prolonged engagement.
A first theme concerned the possibility of fruitful conversation between VID council members and the
technical teams. As various reports from VID Council members suggested, these conversations were
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tentative at first, but became more sustained as the FIA PI workshops progressed. A key challenge in
any multi-disciplinary collaboration, the struggle for shared understanding and vocabulary figured
prominently in these early meetings. Specifically, collaboration across disciplinary boundaries required a
considerable effort at translation, which went far beyond the regular routine of working under a taken-forgranted paradigm. However, while the possibility of collaboration in light of the diverse backgrounds of
participants remained an ongoing concern throughout the project, participants became better acquainted
with the conceptual and technical suppositions of the other groups over time.
“While I had looked at the proposals themselves, and while I am not a neophyte in parsing
computer science documents, I walked away with gaps in my understanding of the proposals.
While some are ‘known unknowns’, some are no doubt ‘unknown unknowns’.” - Deirdre K.
Mulligan
“[S]omeone said that they needed sociologists, and I could not help but wonder what the VID
council members in the room thought about that. I was thinking “We’re right here!!” - Tarleton
Gillespie
“I appreciate better how challenging the concept of VID must be to engineers who have been
trained to think almost exclusively about only one value, efficiency, in their design. We are asking
engineers and scientists to incorporate an entirely different set of values than the one they were
taught to valorize in graduate school” - Paul Ohm
A second theme has to do with the variety of pre-conceived assumptions regarding the direction,
capacities and intents of research on both sides of the Council/FIA team divide. To take one example,
some FIA team members were sometimes frustrated by the difficulty of designing solutions for complex
and sometimes vague ethical or normative concerns put forward by Council members. At the same time,
Council members were sometimes frustrated by the difficulty of engaging FIA team members with the
broader social and cultural contexts of the systems at play as well as the wealth of use case possibilities
not covered in technical designs.
“It is risky business for scientists and technologists (and other creative people) to reveal their
working and possibly yet untested ideas to technical peers. How much more so, to colleagues
who bring complex issues of security, privacy and other human values to the table.” - Batya
Friedman
“Reflecting on this second engagement with the FIA design teams as a member of the VID
Council, the same challenges for engaging in values-in-design... re-emerge: recognizing and
identifying the particular values at play within a given design scenario; justifying a particular set of
values over others; managing the values assumptions and expectations of the designers
themselves; and the complexities and uncertainties of operationalizing values within design
variables.” - Michael Zimmer
A third theme refers to the difficulty of addressing these discrepancies in practice. One approach
would be to encourage a more explicit discussion about methodological assumptions upfront to build
shared values and mitigate distrust among VID Council and FIA members. However, such calls for
"putting the cards on the table" tend to produce mixed results in practice. For example, discussions about
research assumptions often allow people to hide behind grandiose claims about (assumed) disciplinary
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conventions and resort to more or less interesting epistemological and ontological generalities. This runs
the risk of overemphasizing differences where few or none exist.
“I find that compare-and-contrast exercises seem to produce better outcomes in the meetings -more challenges, more specific claims and projections and decisive arguments.” - Finn Brunton
A fourth theme speaks to the difficulty of sustaining this challenging process of translation and
negotiation beyond the actual PI meetings. With the exception of a small number of Council
members, who were embedded in specific FIA projects, the majority of participants could attend only one
or two meetings with little opportunity for a longer-term and more sustainable engagement. This difficulty
was exacerbated by the above mentioned fact that a significant investment was needed to attune to the
at-times diverging sensibilities.
“During the PI meeting I found it difficult to know who was speaking, particularly when comments
came from the audience. Perhaps others at the meeting already knew each other well, so this
may be more of an issue for Council members who attend less regularly” - Batya Friedman
V. Lessons and strategies for future work
Following from these observations, a number of lessons emerged that can usefully guide future practices
of collaboration between heterogeneous audiences of technical and non-technical experts.
1. Facilitation through scenarios and other design methods: Real-world scenarios rich in
sociotechnical ambiguity became a useful way to bring technical team members and VID Council
members together. Grounded in best practices in collaborative design and “design fiction,” a
revamped Council should actively explore existing and novel methods in these fields, developing
compelling narratives and simulations around various values enacted by the projects. For
example, the protesters demonstrating in Tahir Square, Cairo or the streets of Ankara or Rio de
Janeiro wish to communicate anonymously. What could be done to make that happen and what
would be the implications?
“I found the scenario approach personally useful in understanding the FIA presentations,
in conveying what it means to study technical architectures in a values-aware way, and in
working with the other attendees to map out the possible consequences of implementing
these architectures.“ - James Grimmelman
“[S]cenarios would benefit not just from further specificity but from greater ambiguity (the
ambiguity with which any technology is immediately going to struggle once it enters the
messy, context-tangled, feedback-loop laden real world).” - Finn Brunton
2. User focus: One emphasis for future exercises in engagement could be a focus on users of the
FIA projects. Members of the technical teams often spoke of users in vague and abstract ways
that belied quite specific (and sometimes clashing) notions of what or who a user is, and how a
user would be affected by the technical decisions being executed within the “guts” of each
architecture. The new iteration of the Council should help the technical teams explore more
nuanced notions of their users and how they think, feel, and act. Critical to this focus would be
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new members of the Council trained in social sciences not represented on the current body to
help think about the interaction of individuals and collectives: sociologists of science, historians,
and anthropologists.
“From the perspective of the various disciplines that make up the Values In Design
Council, the user is a crucial figure of inquiry, a specific and particular person or group of
people in a rich context of laws and politics, economic processes, social norms and
mores, and technological capabilities and constraints. For network architecture purposes,
the user comes much later on....Clearly, these approaches need to be able to meet in the
middle, and I believe they can, if we make a few common areas of inquiry into meeting
points.” - Finn Brunton
“[T]he next iteration of the VID council might aim to have more social historians [and] more
high-quality ethnographers and sociologists” - Tarleton Gillespie
3. Engagement beyond official meetings: A revamped VID Council should expand on and
strengthen its two parallel models of engagement with the FIA technical teams: both as a
“Council”, and as individual researchers involved in different aspects of the different projects.
There seemed to be consensus among Council members that both approaches were necessary
to carry out a comprehensive and effective research program. One way to achieve this expansion
would be to provide a more focused, better-funded structure for integrating VID Council members
and their students into the technical teams at the outset of the funding round, based on
collaboration between project leads, the Council, and the NSF.
“[W]e should have the VID Council meet each group in private. The current format is too
much like the Roman Coliseum, with the researchers/humans at the front of the room; the
Council members/lions in the front rows; and the members of the other teams/spectators
arrayed behind us.” - Paul Ohm
“[T]he VID Council could seek NSF support sufficient to “embed” a postdoc in every
continuing FIA project. [...] These people would not only get a fascinating research project,
they could help to push sociological insights into the conversations of that project, and
revive the teams’ more worldly initial concerns inside the ever shrinking discourse of their
technical endeavor.” - Tarleton Gillespie
4. Value-centric workshops: Council members should work to develop a series of focused halfday workshops as part of the regular PI meetings, exclusively dealing with particular values
questions, such as “access and openness”, “privacy”, “freedom”, and “security”. The VID Council
should also serve as host for one regular PI meeting.
“[T]he VID Council might consider offering a few targeted values-oriented mini-workshops
[...] The mini-workshops might have three aims: (1) to introduce PIs to concrete tools and
techniques for engaging with human values and technology; (2) provide project teams
with an opportunity to engage with values-oriented issues and problem-solving within the
context of their own projects; and (3) provide project teams with a successful experience
engaging human values in their own systems” - Batya Friedman
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“[T]he VID Council, with advice from the embeds, could continue to attend these FIA
meetings, with the aim of... looking for cracks, reminding them of things squeezed out,
offering sociological insights into users, practice, and institutions, posing challenging
scenarios.” - Tarleton Gillespie
5. Integration of outside experts: VID Council members noted that when invited external
technical experts attended sessions, their presence induced FIA investigators to provide cogent,
basic project descriptions, which also benefitted Council members. This practice would be
beneficial going forward, particularly if expanded to include experts in specific non-technical,
application areas -- potentially making the rich issue of how these competing architectures would
work in everyday life front and center for all FIA participants.
“The questions of what futures might exist into which these architectures could fit, and
how they would change it, were values discussions in all but name, and imply the
possibility of expanding the VID Council’s contribution, not [only] through scenario
planning (or the like), but through a toolkit of discussion approaches that bring time,
deployment and use back into the conversation...” - Finn Brunton
“...external participants were able to not only explain the projects cogently and in
ways that somehow surmounted the technical details...that they seemed more able to ask
critical questions about the projects” - Tarleton Gillespie
References
Flanagan, M., D. Howe & H. Nissenbaum. “Values in Design: Theory and Practice.” In Information
Technology and Moral Philosophy. Van den Hoven, J. and J. Weckert (eds) Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Friedman, B., P. Kahn, & A. Borning. “Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems.” Human
Computer Interaction in Management Information Systems: Applications. New York: M.E. Sharpe,
Inc, 2006.
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