Scholars in a wide range of disciplines have acknowledged that values are embedded in technical systems and devices, consciously or unconsciously. New technologies, such as AI and Big Data have the potential to either strengthen or undermine values, so designers should be very aware of the influence of their designs, take responsibility for their designs and be able to reflectively address the role that values play in this design.

Design and development students have the possibility to make powerful changes in society through the design of digital technologies, for good or for bad. Therefore, higher education on design and development, has the obligation to provide students with the awareness of the role values play in design and the skills and tools needed to become responsible designers of the future. However, many design, information science, and computer science programmes do not explicitly address and incorporate this in a structured way.

The VASE project aims to meet the societal need to provide teachers with the teaching resources needed to effectively educate their students to reflectively consider and intentionally work with values in their designs. The more detailed aim is to iteratively design, develop, pilot test and implement teaching resources for teaching design approaches within the fields of interaction design, information science, computer science, technology-enhanced learning, educational technology, industrial- and product design fields (and potential others).

The final output of the VASE project is a set of teaching resources (teaching materials and activities, course modules, assessment activities etc.) that the teachers can pick and choose from the set based on their own specific educational setting and cultural context. The teaching resources will be packaged as an Open Educational Resource (OER), and published online to be freely downloaded and used by teachers that are interested in teaching the topic, and in fostering a discussion and developing skills among their students.

The direct target group of the VASE project is teachers in different design and development programmes, such as interaction design, information science, computer science, technology-enhanced learning, educational technology, industrial and product design programmes, at university levels. Through the teachers’ adoption of the outputs of the VASE-project students will be educated to become responsible designers of tomorrow’s design and technologies.

Samarbetsparterns
Århus University och Eindhoven University of Technology