The Challenges and Benefits of Bringing Religious Values Into Design

TL;DR

This paper explores the integration of religious values, specifically Catholic Social Teaching, into social media design, highlighting interpretative differences and their implications for ethical technology development.

Contribution

It investigates how technologists and CST scholars interpret religious values in design, revealing areas of agreement and divergence to inform ethical social technology design.

Findings

Technologists and CST scholars generally interpret values similarly.

Scholars better understand the principle of subsidiarity.

Scholars see moderation as more supportive of human dignity.

Abstract

HCI is increasingly taking inspiration from religious traditions as a basis for ethical technology designs. Such ethically-inspired designs can be especially important for social communications technologies, which are associated with numerous societal concerns. If religious values are to be incorporated into real-world designs, there may be challenges when designers work with values unfamiliar to them. Therefore, we investigate the difference in interpretations of values when they are translated to technology designs. To do so we studied design patterns that embody Catholic Social Teaching (CST). We interviewed 24 technologists and 7 CST scholars to assess how their understanding of how those values would manifest in social media designs. We found that for the most part the technologists responded similarly to the CST scholars. However, CST scholars had a better understanding of the principle of subsidiarity, and they believed moderation upheld human dignity more than the technologists did. We discuss the implications of our findings on the designs of social technologies and design processes at large.