(Working Paper) Good Faith Design: Religion as a Resource for Technologists

TL;DR

This paper explores how religious perspectives influence technology use and design, revealing non-neutral biases and proposing six design values to incorporate religion as a sociocultural resource in HCI.

Contribution

It provides an empirically grounded framework for understanding religious users' interactions with technology and introduces six design values to guide more inclusive, culturally aware design practices.

Findings

Religious users perceive non-neutral secular biases in technology.

Religious mental models influence how users navigate technoreligious practices.

Six design values are proposed to incorporate religion into technology design.

Abstract

Previous work has found a lack of research in HCI on religion, partly driven by misunderstandings of values and practices between religious and technical communities. To bridge this divide in an empirically rigorous way, we conducted an interview study with 48 religious people and/or experts from 11 faiths, and we document how religious people experience, understand, and imagine technologies. We show that religious stakeholders find non-neutral secular embeddings in technologies and the firms and people that design them, and how these manifest in unintended harms for religious and nonreligious users. Our findings reveal how users navigate technoreligious practices with religiously informed mental models and what they desire from technologies. Informed by this, we distill six design values -- wonder, humility, space, embodiedness, community, and eternity -- to guide technologists in considering and leveraging religion as an additional, valid sociocultural resource when designing for a holistic user. We further spell out directions for future research.