The Challenges and Benefits of Bringing Religious Values Into Design

TL;DR

The paper investigates how familiarity with Catholic Social Teaching (CST) affects interpretations of how CST values manifest in social-technology designs. Using Conwill et al.'s CST-based design patterns as stimuli, it conducts interviews with 7 CST scholars and 24 technologists to compare embodied principles and how closely interpretations align with the intended CST concepts. Results show broad alignment across groups, with notable exceptions in subsidiarity and moderation, suggesting CST perspectives can reveal design directions that resist the attention economy. The study contributes empirical insights into translating abstract religious values into practical design, and discusses implications for design processes, including training and possible participation of religious scholars to expand moral imagination. This work informs CSCW and HCI communities about leveraging religious frameworks to guide ethical social technologies."

Abstract

HCI is increasingly taking inspiration from religious traditions as a basis for ethical technology designs. Such ethically-inspired designs can be especially important for social communications technologies, which are associated with numerous societal concerns. If religious values are to be incorporated into real-world designs, there may be challenges when designers work with values unfamiliar to them. Therefore, we investigate the difference in interpretations of values when they are translated to technology designs. To do so we studied design patterns that embody Catholic Social Teaching (CST). We interviewed 24 technologists and 7 CST scholars to assess how their understanding of how those values would manifest in social media designs. We found that for the most part the technologists responded similarly to the CST scholars. However, CST scholars had a better understanding of the principle of subsidiarity, and they believed moderation upheld human dignity more than the technologists did. We discuss the implications of our findings on the designs of social technologies and design processes at large.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: The social media design patterns that embody various principles of CST according to Conwill et al. conwill_design_patterns We showed these design patterns to our interview participants to assess their understandings of the principles of CST in a technological context.
• Figure 2: The explanation of the life and dignity of the human person principle of CST from the handout we gave to the study participants. We provided the definition of the principle and gave examples from a non-technological context to explain the principle to participants unfamiliar with CST.
• Figure 3: The results of the Fisher's exact test comparing responses between those with more or less CST experience of if each principle of CST was embodied by the different design patterns. Some evidence against the null hypothesis with p < 0.1 is highlighted in light blue, and significant difference with p < 0.05 is highlighted in dark blue. Instances of p = 1 are bolded. The chart indicates that for the most part responses between groups do not have a significant difference, however some significant differences are seen with the understandings of life and dignity of the human person and subsidiarity between experienced and less experienced groups, as well as understandings of how the CST principles apply to the moderated entry design pattern.
• Figure 4: The number of principles that were incorrectly missed or added by participants with less CST experience for each design pattern. We see that almost half of the time, a principle was incorrectly missed or added compared to what was intended by the design patterns by over half of participants.
• Figure 6: The number of participants with strong CST experience who disagreed that a given design pattern embodied a particular value that Conwill et al. intended for the pattern to embody. We see that very few experts disagreed with Conwill et al. even if they did not come up with that principle in their initial assessment of the design patterns.