What is it about?

Timelines is a design activity that helps participants meet four goals: • Recognize how social values are experienced from different points of view; • Identify how direct and indirect stakeholders may be affected by a technology; • Create a rich fictional world in an easy and accessible way; and • Think about broader social effects related to new technologies. In Timelines, participants generate news headlines to develop a “storyworld,” a hypothetical future in which the technology exists. They then create social media posts as they might be written by various stakeholders with diverse perspectives on the new technology. By encouraging participants to think at both macro- and micro-levels, Timelines helps participants assess potential impacts at a broad scale while also considering the diversity of impacts a single technology can have.

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Why is it important?

Many companies have been caught off guard by the negative impacts of new technologies they have deployed. Timelines aims to help ensure that organizations are not caught off guard by negative impacts after a new technology has already been deployed and adopted. Using Timelines and similar tools can help organizations identify changes that need to be made to a technology’s design or use policies before key decisions are finalized — and before real-world harms can occur.

Perspectives

The Timelines activity can be utilized in different ways by educators, practitioners, researchers, and other values advocates. For instance, it might be used as an educational activity with computer science students, as a training activity in an industry setting, as a probe to understand stakeholder concerns about a product in user research, or as a way for policymakers and non-technical stakeholders to think about values in emerging technologies. While Timelines alone will not solve a values or ethical issue, it can be a useful tool to help explore potential situations and to speculate and present alternatives. Timelines encourages nuanced discussions and can surface and elicit important insights about values and ethics related to technology development and use.

Richmond Wong
University of California Berkeley

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This page is a summary of: Timelines: A World-Building Activity for Values Advocacy, May 2021, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3411764.3445447.
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