Value Lanes: Toolkit to Build Ethical Argumentation in Design Students

By Sai Shruthi Chivukula and Xin Jiang

"Value Lanes is a dialogue-based ethics toolkit and game designed to help designers and technology students and practitioners practice and develop ethical argumentation skills in design decision-making. The toolkit is primarily designed as a pedagogical tool for design and HCI classrooms, helping students practice communicating ethical reasoning and navigating trade-offs collaboratively. The toolkit addresses a gap in existing ethics methods: while many tools help identify values, stakeholders, and social impacts, fewer support designers in clearly articulating and defending ethical positions during the design process.

Value Lanes uses game-like activities to structure conversations around competing values in design. Educators can teach ethical argumentation in their classrooms through exercises such as multi-lane exploration, single-lane focus, debate, and pitching, where they must argue for decisions from different perspectives—such as user, business, technical, legal, or personal viewpoints. This format encourages teams to explore how personal, disciplinary, organizational, and societal values shape technology and design outcomes.
Ultimately, Value Lanes aims to make ethical reasoning in design more visible, collaborative, and practice-oriented, supporting designers in developing stronger skills for discussing and defending value-centered decisions."