Background: As stated in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, 'The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity, and equality between women and men prevail'. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines have acknowledged that values are also embedded in technical systems and devices, consciously or unconsciously. New technologies, such as AI and Big Data have the potential to either strengthen or undermine values, so designers should be very aware of the influence of their designs, take responsibility for their designs and be able to reflectively address the role that values play in this design. Objectives and result: Design and development programmes, such as interaction design, information science, computer science, technology enhanced learning, educational technology, industrial and product design programmes, need to provide students with the awareness of the role values play in design and the skills and tools needed to become responsible designers of the future. However, many programmes do not explicitly address and incorporate this in a structured way yet. VASE aims to meet the societal need to provide teachers with the teaching resources needed to effectively educate their students to reflectively consider and intentionally work with values in their designs. The detailed aim is to iteratively design, develop, pilot test and implement research-based and innovative teaching resources (materials, activities, modules, evaluation and assessment activities and criteria) for teaching value-sensitive design approaches to students at design, and development programmes at university levels. The teaching resources developed will be packaged as an Open Educational Resource (OER) and published online. The partnership: The partnership consist of four partners: coordinating partner Malmö University (SWE), Aarhus University (DEN), University of Gothenburg (SWE), and Eindhoven University of Technology (NL). The strength of the consortium is built upon the competencies of each of the partner organisations, representing various skills, knowledge and experiences from the relevant fields of development work to ensure the successful delivery of the project's outcomes. All partners are involved in teaching design or design-related courses and modules to students in higher education, and have a strong tradition in critical, participatory, and user-centred design. Activities and methodology: The Intellectual Outputs will be developed through joint activities involving all partner organisations, conducted at transnational project meetings, online collaborations, and through local design work involving teachers and students. The teaching resources will be pilot tested twice, iterated and finally implemented as an OER. At the multiplier event, organised in the end of the project, the teaching resources developed and other project results will be shared to and evaluated by teachers and other relevant stakeholders. Methods applied are: educational pattern writing and learning design to iteratively design, develop, pilot test and implement the teaching resources. Through pattern mining workshops, best practice is mapped, through educational pattern writing workshops, teaching resources are created, and through learning design methods for online education these are synthesised and disseminated as intelligible OER. Through the application of educational pattern writing and learning design the project will provide teachers with effective and tested resources to address value-sensitive design in their own courses. Expected impact: The main expected impacts on the primary target group of VASE, which is teachers at different design and development programmes, are: - Improved competencies to educate students on the topic of value-sensitive design, and how to include a focus on values in their courses, - Improved access to teaching resources for training students and practitioners in value-sensitive design, - New pedagogical ideas for renewing own teaching, gained through access to new knowledge on how various teaching resources and criteria can be applied in various cultural and educational settings, - Access to a network around teaching value-sensitive design for institutions providing design and development education in Europe (and potentially beyond). Potential longer-term benefits are: - Enlarged pool of designers and developers being able to consider values in the design of tomorrow's digital technologies, - Increased awareness among teachers of possibilities to educate design and development students about the importance of values, - Strengthened collaborative links between institutions active in design and development education in Europe.
See above.