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Design for the Value of Trust

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Handbook of Ethics, Values, and Technological Design

Abstract

The relationship between design and trust has recently been a topic of considerable scholarly discussion. This is due to several reasons. First, interpersonal trust is an especially relevant concept in information, communication, and networking technologies, because these technologies are designed to facilitate transactions and exchanges between people. Second, digital information has become ubiquitous and can itself be the object of a trust-like attitude, since people rely on it to meet their expectations under conditions of time and information scarcity. And finally, perhaps as a result of the first two points, designers have started to take on the role of expressly encouraging user trust by incorporating in their designs perceptual and social cues known to increase trust. This chapter explores some of the philosophical issues surrounding trust “by design” and explains how to apply Design for Values to trust.

Research for this article was partly supported by the MVI (Responsible Innovation) program of the Dutch NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research), within the project “Medical Trust Beyond Clinical Walls.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cf. Uslaner (2002) who links trust to a general moral worldview linked with personality and childhood experiences.

  2. 2.

    Decentralized processes of control and regulation have developed greatly over the past forty years (Power 2007), and this has coincided with the development and integration of ICT systems in virtually all financial and business processes, so we can expect that similar kinds of cases, and similar issues of trust, will also appear in other regulatory and institutional contexts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Philip J. Nickel

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  1. Philip J. Nickel
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Correspondence to Philip J. Nickel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ethics and Philosophy of Technology, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Jeroen van den Hoven

  2. Department of Ethics and Philosophy of Technology, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Pieter E. Vermaas

  3. Department of Ethics and Philosophy of Technology, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Ibo van de Poel

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Nickel, P.J. (2015). Design for the Value of Trust . In: van den Hoven, J., Vermaas, P., van de Poel, I. (eds) Handbook of Ethics, Values, and Technological Design. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6970-0_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6970-0_21

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