The Ecological Turn in Design: Adopting A Posthumanist Ethics to Inform Value Sensitive Design

Design for Values (DfV) philosophies are a series of design approaches that aim to incorporate human values into the early phases of technological design to direct the path of innovation into beneficial directions. The difficulty and necessity of directing advantageous futures of transformative technologies through the application and adoption of value-based design approaches are apparent, however, the questions of whose values are taken up are of critical importance. DfV philosophies typically aim to enrol the relevant stakeholders that may be affected by the emergence of such a technology. Nonetheless, regardless of which design approach is adopted, all the stakeholders that are enrolled are human stakeholders who propose human values. Contemporary scholarship on metahumanisms, particularly those on posthumanism, have decentered the human from its traditionally privileged position among other forms of life. Persuasive arguments have been forwarded that the humanist position is not nor never has been tenable, and as such scholarship has begun to provide a more encompassing ontology to the investigation of nonhuman values. As such, given the transformative nature that future technologies may pose on the earth and its many assemblages, not all the relevant stakeholders (i.e., nonhuman animals) are taken into the value-investigations of these design approaches. This paper aims to accomplish two primary objectives: (1) propose an argument that a posthumanist ethics in the design of technologies is cogent and, (2) how can existent DfV approaches begin to envision principled and methodological ways of incorporating nonhuman values into design. To do this, this paper will provide a rudimentary outline of what constitutes DfV approaches. A unique design approach – Value Sensitive Design (VSD) – is taken up as an illustrative example given that it, among the other DfV frameworks, most clearly illustrates a principled approach to the integration of values in design.