Human Rights and Value Sensitive Design

Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is focused on values that center on human well-being, human dignity, justice, welfare, and human rights. This means that computer programs implemented in the past few years have been used to ensure and protect your rights as a person. It was made to help people stay safe and secure within programs. Now while VSD has actually been a part of many different programs and people's lives in general there is some explaining to do as far as how it works and what exactly it does.





Value Sensitive Design has been used in a wide range of research and designs such as the bias in computer systems, universal access, Internet privacy, informed consent, ubiquitous sensing of the environment and individual rights, certain urban planning processes, social and moral aspects of human-robot interaction, privacy in public, and designer values in the design process. With all that said it has been used in a variety of ways to solve a variety of problems, these are all linked to making a process that will be fair for all. But it is not only a process that makes things fair for all it is also used to make programs that are more pleasing to the eye and in line with what people believe. For example VSD is used in line with the Google search engine to make some results more human rights friendly. Recently Google has been accused of hiding White Power websites deep within a list of human rights articles, now there are other things that play into this, but as far as the use of VSD these results are made to support human rights and justice among other things. While some people see this a way to bury the existence of these groups it can also been seen as a prolonging of the whole of the human race, a welcoming wish to see human rights at work. While these lines of thinking can go on and on deeper and deeper into true human rights, the use of VSD is clear and has been implemented into our everyday lives.





With that in mind, I think that this process of Value Sensitive Design should be used as much as possible. As such there is also some fine-tuning that needs to be done, this program is simply an assist rather than a full-on solution. The bigger picture is still out there, and people could sit down and talk about fairness and their own personal rights forever, but VSD is being used as it is now.There is still plenty of work for people to do to make sure that it's implications are just and fair for all. However, I do believe that just as there are plenty of ways to police people in real life there should be just as many ways to police them online and while using interlinking systems. You can see this process at work already, it has taken hold in many ways and I believe that it should continue to do so. However, there are plenty of people who don't believe that this is true and in a world entrusted to many that are completely unaware of this issue I believe that it will take years to implement fully.