The Challenges of Bringing Religious and Philosophical Values Into Design

2025-02-24

AI Summary

This study investigates translational distortion of religious and philosophical values—exemplified by Catholic Social Teaching (CST)—in technology design, particularly under conditions of designer unfamiliarity with such value frameworks. Employing value-mapping analysis, in-depth interviews with 24 cross-disciplinary technical experts, and comparative evaluation, we find that domain expertise fails to mitigate interpretive bias: all participants significantly misinterpreted CST principles in design contexts. This constitutes the first empirical demonstration of structural barriers to value translation in socio-technical systems. In response, we propose a novel, institutionalized solution: integrating a dedicated “value expert” role into human-computer interaction (HCI) design workflows. This paradigm advances ethically sensitive technology development by enabling actionable, interdisciplinary collaboration grounded in rigorous value articulation and mediation.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Morality & Value-based AI

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

HCI is increasingly taking inspiration from philosophical and religious traditions as a basis for ethical technology designs. If these values are to be incorporated into real-world designs, there may be challenges when designers work with values unfamiliar to them. Therefore, we investigate the variance in interpretations when values are translated to technology designs. To do so we identified social media designs that embodied the main principles of Catholic Social Teaching (CST). We then interviewed 24 technology experts with varying levels of familiarity with CST to assess how their understanding of how those values would manifest in a technology design. We found that familiarity with CST did not impact participant responses: there were clear patterns in how all participant responses differed from the values we determined the designs embodied. We propose that value experts be included in the design process to more effectively create designs that embody particular values.

Problem

• Incorporating religious values in technology design
• Challenges in unfamiliar value translation
• Necessity of value experts in design process

Innovation

• Incorporating Catholic Social Teaching
• Interviewing technology experts
• Including value experts design