On April 24, 2024, Dr. Paula Helm, University of Amsterdam, held a workshop for RTG doctoral candidates whose topic was Dealing with Value Tensions and Ethical Dilemmas in Information Systems Design. Dr. Helm is currently a guest researcher at the University of Kassel and her stay is the result of a collaboration between ITeG and our RTG Privacy and Trust. The workshop in Darmstadt was organized as a part of a two-day doctoral seminar (1 day Kassel, 1 day Darmstadt).

Participants sent chapters from their dissertations and/or their papers to Dr. Helm in advance. At the start of the workshop, Dr. Helm gave a short input on her research and the topic of the workshop, after which RTG doctoral candidates presented their 10-minute “problem-oriented” input based on the text they had sent.

Based on the almost mythical promise that data-driven insights are the foundation for optimized processes, designs, and decisions, data has developed as an immensely powerful socioeconomic and political force over the past three decades. Consequently, much of current information and knowledge infrastructures are built around the production, augmentation, processing, analyzing, interoperation, and benchmarking of data. In response, the field of Critical Data & Design Studies is concerned with demystifying these complex assemblages. It deconstructs the notion that data is a raw mass and thus an immediate reflection of reality, replacing it with an understanding of data as the product and catalyst of complex social practices that are not only contingent, but oozing with asymmetries of power. Responding to the acknowledgement of bias as an omnipresent fact of life and design, CDS is also concerned with how to translate relevant values into systems design and how to balance tensions between values, requirements, and interests during this process. In addition to focusing on data and design, in this workshop, further-reaching ethical-political challenges that you may be encountered during work were addressed, by highlighting the role of entrenched informatics methodologies, modeling bias, and infrastructural dependencies as other relevant factors that require looking beyond data and design. Dr. Helm also examined the texts in particular with regard to feminist and postcolonial dimensions of privacy and trust in information systems (#power asymmetries).