Best paper honorable mention award: ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems

Scenario Co-Creation Cards: A Culturally Sensitive Tool for Eliciting Values

Values are an integral part of human identity and have a pervasive impact upon human behavior. This makes understanding them a central concern in the design of technology, as exemplified by approaches such as Value Sensitive Design ("VSD"). Identifying and concreting the values held by a given population can be a difficult endeavor, especially where there is a cultural barrier limiting an effective discussion of them, for example in societies where freedom of expression is discouraged. Addressing this concern requires an in-depth consideration of appropriate value elicitation methods, which responds to the fact that it is not possible to understand values detached from their cultural context. We introduce a novel implicit method, Scenario Co-Creation Cards, and show how it can be used to incorporate existing models of culture in the value elicitation process. We demonstrate this in a case study of Saudi women's visibility in the digital media.