Capability Sensitive Design for Health and Wellbeing Technologies
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Capability Sensitive Design for Health and Wellbeing Technologies Naomi Jacobs1 Received: 18 December 2019 / Accepted: 29 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This article presents the framework Capability Sensitive Design (CSD), which consists of merging the design methodology Value Sensitive Design (VSD) with Martha Nussbaum’s capability theory. CSD aims to normatively assess technology design in general, and technology design for health and wellbeing in particular. Unique to CSD is its ability to account for human diversity and to counter (structural) injustices that manifest in technology design. The basic framework of CSD is demonstrated by applying it to the hypothetical design case of a therapy chatbot for mental health. By applying CSD to a design case, the merits of this new framework over the standard VSD approach become apparent. Also, the application demonstrates what a technology design would look like when attention is paid to capabilities right from the start of the design process. Keywords Value sensitive design · Capability approach · Capability sensitive design · Design framework · Ethics by design · Ethics
Introduction In recent years, there has been an increasing awareness of the impact that technology design can have on supporting or undermining values.1 This awareness that technology design is not value-neutral, but instead embodies moral choices, has led to the development of various design methods that explicitly pay attention to values and ethical considerations. One of the most prominent and influential methods is Value 1 Present-day examples of technology design in which values such as fairness or equality were undermined include racial discrimination in facial recognition software and algorithmic bias in recruiting software tools, while the app I Reveal My Attributes (IRMA) is an example of a software design that explicitly supports the value of privacy.
* Naomi Jacobs [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy and Ethics, and Human‑Technology Interaction, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
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Sensitive Design (VSD): a design methodology that aims to address and account for values in a "principled and systematic manner throughout the technical design process" (Friedman and Hendry 2019, p. 4). What is unique about VSD is that it proactively integrates ethics into technology design (Van den Hoven 2008). Despite being a highly promising approach to ethics of technology design, VSD faces various challenges (for a detailed discussion of these challenges see:Borning and Muller 2012; Davis and Nathan 2015; Jacobs and Huldtgren 2018; MandersHuits 2010;). The three most prominent challenges that VSD faces include: (1) obscuring the voice of its practitioners and thereby claiming unfounded moral authority; (2) taking stakeholder values as leading values in the design process without questioning whether what is valued by stakeholders also ought to be valued; and (3) not being able to provide normative justification for
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