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The design of new technologies is a cooperative task (between designers on teams, and between designers and users) with ethical import. Studying technology development teams' engagement with the ethical aspects of their work is important, but engagement with ethical issues is an unobservable construct without agreement on what observable factors comprise it. Ethical sensitivity (ES), a construct studied in medicine, accounting, and other professions, offers a framework of observable factors by operationalizing ethical engagement in workplaces into component parts. However, ES has primarily been studied as a property of individuals rather than groups and in professions outside of computing. This paper uses a corpus of 108 ES studies from 1985-2020 to adapt the framework for studies of technology design teams. From the ES corpus, we build an umbrella framework that conceptualizes ES as comprising the moment of noticing an ethical problem (recognition), the process of building understanding of the situation (particularization), and the decision about what to do (judgment). This framework makes theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of how ethics are operationalized on design teams. We find that ethical sensitivity provides useful language for studies of collaboration and communication around ethics; suggests opportunities for, and evaluations of, ethical interventions for design workplaces; and connects team members' backgrounds, educational experiences, work practices, and organizational factors to design decisions. Simultaneously, existing research in HCI and CSCW addresses the limited range of research methods currently employed in the ES literature, adding rich, contextualized data about situated and embodied ethical practice to the theory.

There is growing consensus that teaching computer ethics is important, but there is little consensus on how to do so. One unmet challenge is increasing the capacity of computing students to make decisions about the ethical challenges embedded in their technical work. This paper reports on the design, testing, and evaluation of an educational simulation to meet this challenge. The privacy by design simulation enables more relevant and effective computer ethics education by letting students experience and make decisions about common ethical challenges encountered in real-world work environments. This paper describes the process of incorporating empirical observations of ethical questions in computing into an online simulation and an in-person board game. We employed the Values at Play framework to transform empirical observations of design into a playable educational experience. First, we conducted qualitative research to discover when and how values levers—practices that encourage values discussions during technology development—occur during the design of new mobile applications. We then translated these findings into gameplay elements, including the goals, roles, and elements of surprise incorporated into a simulation. We ran the online simulation in five undergraduate computer and information science classes. Based on this experience, we created a more accessible board game, which we tested in two undergraduate classes and two professional workshops. We evaluated the effectiveness of both the online simulation and the board game using two methods: a pre/post-test of moral sensitivity based on the Defining Issues Test, and a questionnaire evaluating student experience. We found that converting real-world ethical challenges into a playable simulation increased student’s reported interest in ethical issues in technology, and that students identified the role-playing activity as relevant to their technical coursework. This demonstrates that roleplaying can emphasize ethical decision-making as a relevant component of technical work.

Research using online datasets from social media platforms continues to grow in prominence, but recent research suggests that platform users are sometimes uncomfortable with the ways their posts and content are used in research studies. While previous research has suggested that a variety of contextual variables may influence this discomfort, such factors have yet to be isolated and compared. In this article, we present results from a factorial vignette survey of American Facebook users. Findings reveal that researcher domain, content type, purpose of data use, and awareness of data collection all impact respondents’ comfort—measured via judgments of acceptability and concern—with diverse data uses. We provide guidance to researchers and ethics review boards about the ways that user reactions to research uses of their data can serve as a cue for identifying sensitive data types and uses.

Due to the evolving nature of technology and its impact on individuals, communities and society, practitioners and designers in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) are expected to consider ethics in their work. This role has inspired the development of a number of resources for practice, such as tools, frameworks and methods to tackle ethical issues in HCI. But these suffer from low adoption rate potentially because they are not yet part of the standard body of knowledge. To mitigate the issue, we argue that there is an urgent need for ethics education in HCI. Beyond defining ethics, an ethics curriculum must enable practitioners to reflect and allow consideration of intended and unintended consequences of the technologies they create from the ground up, rather than as a fix or an afterthought. In this co-design workshop, we aim to build upon existing practices and knowledge of ethics in HCI and work with the CHI community to enrich ethics curriculum. We will scaffold our collective understandings of the existing resources and create guidelines that support interactive educational experiences to support HCI ethics curriculum.

Internet protocol development is a social process, and resulting protocols are shaped by their developers’ politics and values. This article argues that the work of protocol development (and more broadly, infrastructure design) poses barriers to developers’ reflection upon values and politics in protocol design. A participant observation of a team developing internet protocols revealed that difficulties defining the stakeholders in an infrastructure and tensions between local and global viewpoints both complicated values reflection. Further, Internet architects tended to equate a core value of interoperability with values neutrality. The article describes how particular work practices within infrastructure development overcame these challenges by engaging developers in praxis: situated, lived experience of the social nature of technology.

An ongoing challenge within the diverse HCI and social computing research communities is understanding research ethics in the face of evolving technology and methods. Building upon successful town hall meetings at CHI 2018, GROUP 2018 and CSCW 2018, this panel will be structured to facilitate audience discussion and to collect input about current challenges and processes. It will be led by members of the ACM SIGCHI Research Ethics Committee. We will pose open questions and invite audience discussion of practices centered on recent "hot topic" issues. For this year's town hall, the primary focus will be on paths to balancing the often-competing regulatory frameworks under which we operate (some of which having recently undergone significant revisions) with our community's efforts to reveal ethical challenges posed by new interactive technologies and new contexts of use. We will engage the audience in discussions on whether there is a non-colonial role for ethics education within the broad HCI community, how that may capture the cultural and disciplinary differences that are woven into CHI's fabric, and how research ethical issues should be handled in SIGCHI paper submission and review process.

BackgroundThe growing field of personal sensing harnesses sensor data collected from individuals’ smartphones to understand their behaviors and experiences. Such data could be a powerful tool within mental health care. However, it is important to note that the nature of these data differs from the information usually available to, or discussed with, health care professionals. To design digital mental health tools that are acceptable to users, understanding how personal sensing data can be used and shared is critical. ObjectiveThis study aimed to investigate individuals’ perspectives about sharing different types of sensor data beyond the research context, specifically with doctors, electronic health record (EHR) systems, and family members. MethodsA questionnaire assessed participants’ comfort with sharing six types of sensed data: physical activity, mood, sleep, communication logs, location, and social activity. Participants were asked about their comfort with sharing these data with three different recipients: doctors, EHR systems, and family members. A series of principal component analyses (one for each data recipient) was performed to identify clusters of sensor data types according to participants’ comfort with sharing them. Relationships between recipients and sensor clusters were then explored using generalized estimating equation logistic regression models. ResultsA total of 211 participants completed the questionnaire. The majority were female (171/211, 81.0%), and the mean age was 38 years (SD 10.32). Principal component analyses consistently identified two clusters of sensed data across the three data recipients: “health information,” including sleep, mood, and physical activity, and “personal data,” including communication logs, location, and social activity. Overall, participants were significantly more comfortable sharing any type of sensed data with their doctor than with the EHR system or family members (P

What are the best ways for design teams attend to issues of power, inequity, trust and other ethical concerns as they arise in design? Literature on value-sensitive design (VSD) and technology ethics has advocated for a range of design methods that propose different roles and responsibility for ethics during technology development. This paper explores four provocations that imagine different roles and responsibilities for moral and ethical reasoning on design teams: participatory design (in which diverse stakeholders may represent their own values in the design process), values advocates (introducing experts to lead values discussions or conduct ethics interventions), embedding values discussions within design and encouraging ‘moral exemplars’ within design. Each of these posits different logistical arrangements as well as different levels of expertise in ethical practice. The paper uses examples from the VSD and computer ethics literatures as well as the authors’ ethnographic work to explore the advantages, challenges and consequences of each approach. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS (i) Analysis of the ethical and practical impact of contrasting value-sensitive design models. (ii) Discussion of the responsibility of users, ethicists, social scientists and technologists for design ethics.

Creating data visualizations requires diverse skills including computer programming, statistics, and graphic design. Visualization practitioners, often formally trained in one but not all of these areas, increasingly face the challenge of reconciling, integrating and prioritizing competing disciplinary values, norms and priorities. To inform multidisciplinary visualization pedagogy, we analyze the negotiation of values in the rhetoric and affordances of two common tools for creating visual representations of data: R and Adobe Illustrator. Features of, and discourse around, these standard visualization tools illustrate both a convergence of values and priorities (clear, attractive, and communicative data-driven graphics) side-by-side with a retention of rhetorical divisions between disciplinary communities (statistical analysis in contrast to creative expression). We discuss implications for data-driven work and data science curricula within the current environment where data visualization practice is converging while values in rhetoric remain divided.

An ongoing challenge within the diverse HCI and social computing research communities is understanding research ethics in the face of evolving technology and methods. Building upon successful town hall meetings at ACM conferences including CSCW, CHI, GROUP, and IDC, this panel will be structured to facilitate audience discussion and to collect input about current challenges and processes. It will be led by members of the SIGCHI Research Ethics Committee. We will pose open questions and invite audience discussion of practices centered around issues such as recent changes to regulatory requirements (GDPR, US Institutional Review Boards), and cultural and disciplinary differences in ethical practices. There will also be discussion of how research ethical issues should be handled in SIGCHI paper submission and review processes, and how we might create and disseminate ethics resources.

Mobile consumer devices are increasingly used as personal sensing instruments, where users record their daily habits, track their physical activity, or monitor their health. Research is underway to extend today's diversity of vendor-designed "walled garden" repositories, ultimately repositioning individuals as producers, consumers, and remixers of a vast openly shared public data set. By empowering people to easily measure, report, and compare their own personal environments, such tools transform everyday citizens into reporting agents who uncover and visualize unseen elements of their own everyday experiences. With this important new shift in mobile device usage - from a communication tool to a ubiquitous "experience sharing instrument" - comes a new dimension in trust and privacy challenges. Today's privacy and trust tools that address web surfing and simple location-based services already struggle to be adopted in practice. We argue that in order to prepare for tomorrow's sensor sharing, privacy and trust must be addressed holistically, incorporating both technical approaches and actual sharing behavior. This article summarizes the results of a five-day Dagstuhl Seminar on mobile experience sharing and outlines future research necessary in this domain.

Author(s): Shilton, Katie; Burke, Jeffrey A; Claffy, KC; Zhang, Lixia | Abstract: Considering the social impact of a proposed future Internet architecture.

Research focused on values in information systems (IS) is conducted using a diversity of approaches, methods and theoretical frameworks. This paper presents a systematic literature review to investigate the relationship between values and materiality -- specifically, how researchers materialize values -- in IS research. Analysis of the literature demonstrates that IS researchers perceive the values of research subjects in their language, attitudes, design, and practices. They also materialize values at different temporal points in the research process. These materialization choices are largely independent of research method, and are an important research design consideration. Conceptualizing the materiality of values can enable values researchers to be explicit about methodological choices regarding the observation of values.

Defining ethical practices for research using data from digital and social media communities is an ongoing challenge. This paper reports on interviews with digital and social media researchers to investigate the challenges they experienced when collecting, managing, and analyzing online data. Analysis of the interviews reveals a diverse set of ethical challenges that push at the boundaries of existing research ethics guidance. The interview data also describes existing practices for navigating ethical quandaries, and documents resources that help researchers meet ethical challenges. The analysis of the data points to opportunities for review boards and ethics researchers as well as new debates to undertake as a community.