The Values of Value in AI Adoption: Rethinking Efficiency in UX Designers' Workplaces

TL;DR

This paper explores how UX designers perceive AI adoption as a complex negotiation of values, roles, and responsibilities across individual, team, and organizational levels, emphasizing social and ethical dimensions beyond efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a nuanced understanding of AI adoption as a value negotiation process, highlighting social, ethical, and organizational factors influencing designers' perspectives.

Findings

Designers balance efficiency with skill development and professional worth.

AI adoption involves negotiating collaboration, responsibility, and rigor.

Organizational norms and compliance influence AI integration decisions.

Abstract

Although organizations increasingly position AI adoption as a pathway to competitiveness and innovation, organizations' perspectives on productivity and efficiency often clash with workers' perspectives on AI's economic and social value. Through design workshops with 15 UX designers, we examine how AI adoption unfolds across individual, team, and organizational scales. At the individual level, designers weighed efficiency, skill development, and professional worth. At the team level, they negotiated collaboration, responsibility, and rigor. At the organizational level, adoption was shaped by compliance requirements and organizational norms. Across these scales, discourses of efficiency carried social and ethical dimensions of responsibility, trust, and autonomy. We view adoption as a site where roles, relationships, and power are reconfigured. We argue that AI adoption should be understood as a process of negotiating values, and call for future work examining how AI systems redistribute responsibility among team members, while understanding how such shifts could strengthen worker agency.