Towards Creating Infrastructures for Values and Ethics Work in the Production of Software Technologies

2025-07-15

AI Summary

This paper addresses a fundamental ethical dilemma in software development: prevailing approaches emphasize individual-level tools while neglecting structural barriers rooted in organizational practices, socio-technical systems, and governance mechanisms. To redress this imbalance, the study advances an “infrastructure-centered” conceptual framework—replacing the dominant “tool-centered” paradigm—drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) and media infrastructure theory to systematically analyze the institutional conditions enabling ethical action. Through interdisciplinary conceptual analysis, it exposes how values become embedded—and constrained—by tacit architectural assumptions and identifies critical intervention points within technical and organizational infrastructures. The work contributes novel theoretical insights and actionable design strategies to HCI, shifting emphasis from individual accountability toward systemic empowerment. Ultimately, it supports the development of sustainable, institutionally embedded ethical practices in technology production. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Bias, Fairness & Equity
• Humans and AI: Other Foundations of Human Computation & AI
• Machine Learning: Ethics, Bias, and Fairness

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications

Abstract

Recognizing how technical systems can embody social values or cause harms, human-computer interaction (HCI) research often approaches addressing values and ethics in design by creating tools to help tech workers integrate social values into the design of products. While useful, these approaches usually do not consider the politics embedded in the broader processes, organizations, social systems, and governance structures that affect the types of actions that tech workers can take to address values and ethics. This paper argues that creating infrastructures to support values and ethics work, rather than tools, is an approach that takes these broader processes into account and opens them up for (re)design. Drawing on prior research conceptualizing infrastructures from science & technology studies and media studies, this paper outlines conceptual insights from infrastructures studies that open up new tactics for HCI researchers and designers seeking to support values and ethics in design.

Problem

• Addressing values and ethics in software design processes
• Considering broader organizational and social systems in ethics work
• Proposing infrastructure over tools for ethical design support

Innovation

• Infrastructures support values and ethics work
• Considers broader organizational and social processes
• Draws on infrastructure studies for new tactics