sCEthics: embedding ethical values in cognitive engineering

Abstract

Contemporary and future technologies are getting more intelligent and connect easily to one another, potentially leading to conflicts with human ethical values. Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is promising for its focus on ethical values but lacks an explicit and systematical elicitation of requirements, which is targeted explicitly in the situated Cognitive Engineering (sCE) methodology. Therefore, a sCE tool was combined with VSD leading to the sCEthics design methodology that accounts for ethical values in an explicit and systematical way. This entailed implementing five requirements and these were evaluated with eleven participants. The results reveal that the implementation of requirements relating to values, policies and design patterns are seen as useful, but require minor revisions. The extended scenario system was not seen as very useful while both visualization overviews were perceived as extremely useful. These results show that sCEthics serves as a structured and guiding user-centered approach towards the design of ethical intelligent systems.