A Tool
to Enrich
Design Concepts
with
Human Values


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HuValue aims at bringing human values into a design process and enriching their design concepts with human value. This aim was set due to considering the integral role of technology and its designers in forming the future, and also the significance of human values in everyday life. However, only a few design approaches concentrate on human values, and there is even little agreement between them to identify values. This tool intends to support designers bringing human values consciously and explicitly into the design process and give depth to design discussions and practices.

Components
HuValue Tool

Hu
Value
Tool


The tool, grounded on the HuValue framework, is a card-based tool containing:

One value wheel

45 value words

207 picture cards

Value wheel is a circle with nine value groups. Each group is introduced with an icon, a label, a mood-board, a descriptive sentence, five key values and some relevant terms. In the wheel, you can rank each group in their order of importance to you. Every group have a five-point-scale as “Extremely important”, “Very important”, “Important”, “Somewhat important”, and “Not important”. In addition to the words, colour saturation is stressed at various levels of the scale; the highest saturation for “Extremely important” and the lowest saturation for “Not important” and three more in between.

Value words are 45 two-sided cards (5 × 7 cm) with a value word on the front and its relevant value group (based on empirical research) at the back.

Picture cards contain 207 cards (7 × 10 cm) in three different types; 66 activities, 66 personas, and 75 products/services. Every activity cards contain a picture showing an activity or behaviour, without any description. At the bottom of these cards, there is a space in which people can write their own interpretations. The persona and products cards are combinations of pictures and texts. Persona cards include well-known people from all over the world in different disciplines, without judgment about their positive or negative influences, in addition to some artificial personas. Products/services cards contain a wide variety of products, services and design concepts.
Applications
Generally, the HuValue tool is a means to facilitate thinking and discussing human values. This tool supports designers with simple but familiar materials during their design process to analyse everything (object/subject/situation) from a value point of view. For instance, in a design project it can be a person as a designer (to define her/his vision) or as a user (to identify her/his needs, wants and ideals), or an existing product or service (to know by using this product which value(s) become stronger/weaker?) or a situation and context of use (to clarify the design challenge and to define the design goal) or a design concept or an idea (to evaluate the concept). This approach, as the HuValue perspective, enables them to be aware and sensitive about human values and consider various aspects of their topic and different types of values even if they personally do not value them. In a design process, the tool can be used for various purposes: In the analysis phase, a design challenge, design goal, the context of use and the user’s needs and wants can be studied from a value-centred view for a wider and deeper understanding of design situation. In design phase including ideation and conceptualisation, human values can be used not only as a source of inspiration to diverge the ideas but also to cluster and converge them. In addition, they can be seen as criteria for deciding on the final idea. In the evaluation phase, the final concepts can be evaluated from a value perspective.
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