The Value of Experience-Centered Design to Responsible Software Design and Engineering

Abstract

In this conceptual article, we review experience-centered approaches to the design of personal digital interactive technologies, with a view to exploring how these approaches might be of value in understanding the experience-in-use and the responsible design of today's highly networked, data-rich, and ubiquitous software technologies. Experience-centered design research leans heavily on pragmatist philosophy for its conceptual underpinnings, particularly John Dewey's accounts of aesthetic experience and of inquiry. After reviewing this body of work, we argue that these foundations could be usefully extended to also include Dewey's approach to ethics as an empirical, situated act of moral imagination. In addition, we look to other researchers for perspectives that complement and extend Deweyan experiential pragmatics. In particular, we look to the ways in which Susan Leigh Star's account of socio-technical infrastructures and dialogical approaches to human relations together can provide important insights into the experience-in-use of today's digital infrastructure and can critically highlight issues of boundaries and privacy. We also offer pragmatic and methodological concepts that may be of value to the field of responsible software design and engineering.