Self-reflection on personal values to support value-sensitive design

The impact of ubiquitous technology and social media on our lives is rapidly increasing. We explicitly need to consider personal values affected or violated by these systems. Value-sensitive design can guide a designer in building systems that account for human values. However, the framework lacks clear steps to guide elicitation of stakeholders’ values. We argue that developing tools for value elicitation that designers can use or give to stakeholders is a feasible solution to this challenge. Crucial in eliciting values is that a stakeholder has to have an understanding about her own values and how they relate in importance. This requires self-reflection. Self-reflection, in turn, requires thinking or analysing one’s behaviour in meaningful moments over a long period of time. In this paper, we investigate how current methods from various disciplines can be combined and applied in a tool supporting reflection on personal values. We present an exploratory study investigating photo elicitation and a value questionnaire as methods for expressing and eliciting values with a tool. Based on the results we present an envisioned mobile personal informatics application that triggers people to reflect about their values in real-life contexts.