Towards Creating Infrastructures for Values and Ethics Work in the Production of Software Technologies

TL;DR

This paper advocates for developing infrastructural approaches in HCI to support values and ethics work in software production, emphasizing broader social and organizational contexts over individual tools.

Contribution

It introduces a conceptual framework for infrastructures in HCI that considers social and political dimensions of ethics in software development.

Findings

Infrastructures can reshape social and organizational processes affecting ethics.

Supporting values work requires rethinking design beyond individual tools.

Infrastructural approaches open new avenues for ethics in HCI.

Abstract

Recognizing how technical systems can embody social values or cause harms, human-computer interaction (HCI) research often approaches addressing values and ethics in design by creating tools to help tech workers integrate social values into the design of products. While useful, these approaches usually do not consider the politics embedded in the broader processes, organizations, social systems, and governance structures that affect the types of actions that tech workers can take to address values and ethics. This paper argues that creating infrastructures to support values and ethics work, rather than tools, is an approach that takes these broader processes into account and opens them up for (re)design. Drawing on prior research conceptualizing infrastructures from science \& technology studies and media studies, this paper outlines conceptual insights from infrastructures studies that open up new tactics for HCI researchers and designers seeking to support values and ethics in design.