Design Patterns for the Common Good: Building Better Technologies Using the Wisdom of Virtue Ethics

TL;DR

The paper proposes Virtue-Guided Technology Design, a method to translate virtue ethics into practical UI/UX design patterns. Using Catholic Social Teaching as a proof-of-concept, it identifies seven CST-inspired social-media design patterns and evaluates them through semi-structured interviews with 24 technologists, showing general embodiment of the intended virtues and favorable reception, though with concerns around learning, privacy, and solidarity. By adapting Value Sensitive Design to incorporate virtue ethics and empirical validation, the work demonstrates a concrete path to embed human flourishing into technology design and discusses potential adoption in industry, highlighting challenges for big tech and opportunities for socially conscious organizations. The study advocates subsidiarity and context-aware patterns, calls for cross-tradition expansion, and envisions a future Internet shaped by community-based, open-source designs guided by virtue ethics.

Abstract

Virtue ethics is a philosophical tradition that emphasizes the cultivation of virtues in achieving the common good. It has been suggested to be an effective framework for envisioning more ethical technology, yet previous work on virtue ethics and technology design has remained at theoretical recommendations. Therefore, we propose an approach for identifying user experience design patterns that embody particular virtues to more concretely articulate virtuous technology designs. As a proof of concept for our approach, we documented seven design patterns for social media that uphold the virtues of Catholic Social Teaching. We interviewed 24 technology researchers and industry practitioners to evaluate these patterns. We found that overall the patterns enact the virtues they were identified to embody; our participants valued that the patterns fostered intentional conversations and personal connections. We pave a path for technology professionals to incorporate diverse virtue traditions into the development of technologies that support human flourishing.

Figures (15)

• Figure 1: Process diagram describing our proposed process for Virtue-Guided Technology Design. The process begins with identifying a technology to build and the virtues that will underpin it, then moves to a conceptual inquiry of what the virtues mean in the context of the chosen technology, a two-part technical inquiry to discover and catalog the design patterns that uphold such virtues, and an empirical inquiry to validate the process.
• Figure 2: The template for our virtue-inspired design patterns, adapted from Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Softwaregamma1995pattern. Each design pattern consists of this information.
• Figure 3: Conceptual Inquiry of what Catholic Social Teaching principles mean in the context of social media platforms, adapted from the book Virtue in Virtual Spacesconwill2024virtue.
• Figure 4: An illustration of the technical inquiry process. When examining the design features that upheld or violated life and dignity of the human person, option for the poor and vulnerable, and care of God's creation, we noticed a pattern: private messages with a finite length in Gmail uphold these principles, and the opposing design of public messages with infinite amounts of content in X and TikTok violate these principles. Considered together, this inspired us to document the "Chats Over Feeds" virtuous design pattern.
• Figure 5: The seven design patterns for social media we documented that uphold the principles of Catholic Social Teaching.