Value sensitive design of interactions with urbansim indicators
Alan H. Borning, Batya Friedman, Janet Davis · 2006
Around the United States and around the world, people grapple with issues such as traffic jams, affordable housing, and urban sprawl. Decisions such as whether to build a new freeway, expand transit service, or change land use regulations interact in complex ways and have long-term consequences. At the same time, stakeholders have strongly held, often conflicting views about what will make the city a better place. I present my contributions to work an developing interfaces for UrbanSim, a large-scale simulation system that projects patterns of urban development for periods of twenty years or more under different scenarios, to inform deliberation about the consequences of these decisions. My specific focus is an the design of interactions with indicators, which portray key results from UrbanSim. I and my colleagues draw an the Value Sensitive Design theory and methodology to proactively account for human values in the design of interactions with indicators. In designing with an eye towards the explicitly supported values of representativeness, fairness, and support for a democratic society, we face several challenges, including responding to the values and interests of diverse stakeholders, providing ready-to-hand documentation that supports the system's legitimation, balancing this relatively neutral information with a range of advocacy positions, and engaging and informing citizens who may have different interests and less expertise than urban planners who use UrbanSim in their work. We address these challenges in the development of these new tools for interacting with UrbanSim indicators: (1) ready-to-hand Technical Documentation providing factual information about indicators for urban planners and other stakeholders; (2) Indicator Perspectives intended to provide a platform for political advocacy and civic discourse; and (3) Household Indicators intended to help citizens explore the question, How could this decision affect me? Our work contributes to Value Sensitive Design as an example of designing a system for effective use in a highly political environment with multiple stakeholders having conflicting interests and differing expertise.