Damian Sendler: Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is merged with Martha Nussbaum’s capability theory to create the Capability Sensitive Design (CSD) paradigm. Technology design for health and well-being is the focus of CSD’s normative assessments.
Damian Sendler
Damian Jacob Sendler: Attributing human diversity and countering (structural) inequities in technology design is a unique feature of CSD. Using the hypothetical instance of a treatment chatbot for mental health, the essential framework of CSD is shown. Using CSD in a design scenario reveals the advantages of this new framework over the traditional VSD approach. It also shows what a technological design looks like when capabilities are taken into account from the beginning of the design process.
Damien Sendler: A growing number of people are becoming aware of how technology design may either support or undermine a person’s ideals.
Dr. Sendler: Because of this recognition that technology design is not value-neutral, but rather incorporates moral choices, several design methodologies have been developed that explicitly pay attention to values and ethical considerations.
Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler: An increasingly popular approach is called Value Sensitive Design (VSD), which tries to take values into consideration throughout the entire design process in an organized, principled, and systematic manner. When it comes to technology design, VSD is unusual since it proactively incorporates ethics into the process.
Damian Jacob Sendler
Damian Sendler: VSD, despite being a highly promising approach to ethics in technology design, confronts numerous. In order to overcome the three most significant challenges that VSD faces, it must obscure the voice of its practitioners, thereby claiming unfounded moral authority; assume that stakeholder values are leading values in the design process without questioning whether what stakeholders value also ought to be valued; and cannot justify value trade-offs in the design process.
Damian Jacob Sendler: Ethical theory can help VSD practitioners overcome these obstacles. Ethical considerations are taken at face value in this paper. That being said, Alessandra Cenci and Dylan Cawthorne’s (2020) ‘Sen-procedural VSD-approach‘ may be an alternative solution to the difficulties of VSD that does not require the addition of an ethical framework.
In the context of ethics and technology design, the capability approach (CA) has been examined by several scholars. That’s why this article provides a systematic investigation of how VSD’s tripartite methodology can be combined with the normative foundation of capability theory.
Damian Sendler: For technoethicists in general and designers and engineers in the field of health and well-being technology in particular, the CSD is intended to be useful. Because of these three factors, CSD is ideally equipped to evaluate technology design for health and well-being. Since both CSD and technology design are primarily concerned with enhancing and expanding human potential, this convergence makes perfect sense. Second, CSD is able to account for human variety by focusing on conversion factors, such as people’s ability to convert resources into capabilities.
Damian Jacob Sendler: In the context of technology design for health and well-being, CSD is ideally suited as it tries to normatively analyze technology design based on whether the design expands human capacities that are considered useful. A person’s ability to attain or exercise a cluster of essential human tasks is a measure of health. CSD appears to be particularly well-suited for normatively assessing technology designs for health and well-being given that we subscribe to this definition of health.
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