Which values are most important?
Determine relative importance of the values
What is the result of this step?
This step will provide an overview over the values that deserve to be prioritized in the design of the technology.
Why?
It is important to find out which values are most important and deserve to be taken into account in the design of the technology.
How?
Here you should use the output of step 3 which will be a list of values. In this step the tech developers themselves determine which values are most important. They can do this by ascribing a weight factor to each value: in the form of a number. This indicates the relative importance of each value or -in other words- their relative ranking for different stakeholders, such as noted in the following table (see for a more elaborate description box 6).
| Tech developers | Farmers | Policy makers |
Ownership | 10 | 10 | 1 |
Fairness | 3 | 10 | 3 |
Care for the commons | 1 | 5 | 10 |
Transparency | 10 | 3 | 10 |
In some situations, however, values will conflict, or stakeholders prioritize different values. These situations may raise ethical questions. Whenever such questions come forward, it may be important to move to step 5, which asks to deliberate about the right answer to these questions and come to a conclusion. If values do not conflict, step 5 can be skipped.
Box 6: Example
Applying weight
factors to each value
Box 6
Example of applying weight factors
to each value
For the roll out of smart meters for energy use in the Netherlands the relative ranking of values of stakeholders was examined by Van de Kaa et al. (2019). Their focus was lying on the acceptance of smart meters. First, they reviewed the literature on technology acceptance for smart metering, in order to explore relevant values. This list of values was screened by interviewing a panel of experts with extensive knowledge on dimensions of acceptance. This resulted in a set of values for each of the groups of stakeholders: privacy, environmental sustainability, compatibility, cost-effectiveness, trust, reliability, autonomy, justice. The next step was that experts were asked to evaluate the importance of the values for the acceptance of smart metering, and they were asked to empathize with the general public in order to answer what society would think about certain matters. The experts were asked to determine the most
important value (which is called the best) and the least important value (which is called the worst) of each set of values. They determined the weight of values with regard to each other, in order to identify those that are most important for the acceptance of new technology.
Source: Kaa, van de G., J. Rezaei, B. Taebi, I. van de Poel, A. Kizhakenath (2019). How to weigh values in value sensitive design: a best worst method approach for the case of smart metering.