As human beings, we create artefacts and technologies to safeguard our well-being and advance our society; it is therefore critical that these artefacts and technologies actually reflect our human values. Values are what we consider to be good or important, such as our beliefs in honesty, respect, fairness, privacy, affection, self-direction, achievement, openness, and joie de vivre. Inability to understand others’ values and to critically examine one’s own values often leads to beliefs and practices that undermine our democracy and result in conflict. This value-centric paradigm advocates that technology should be designed to embody human values, instead of just meeting users’ often short-lived and fast-changing needs, wants and preferences.

Our work tackles a complementary and equally important kind of value alignment problem—the design of social computing technology that enables people, working in groups and often remotely, to create complex value-aligned artefacts. Achieving a joint vision is difficult, because individuals need to know their own values, be able to communicate these values clearly, and come to a resolution when their values are conflicted. We propose to design novel interfaces and agents for supporting the process of value discovery, value articulation and value negotiation, and understand how these technologies facilitate the creation of value-aligned artefacts in collaborative annotation and co-creation tasks.