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Designers: Joana Couto, Inês Silva, Ricardo Melo, Human-centred Design Team, Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS, Porto, Portugal
Manufacturer: Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS, Porto, Portugal

Signo is a card-based game built to support designers, researchers and other stakeholders in eliciting, mapping and prioritising values to inform digital technology design. The game is a tool that fosters a bottom-up approach to Value-Sensitive Design (VSD), promoting thought-provoking discussions and reflections among team members and diverse collaborators. Seated around a table, players explore their opinions, beliefs, and points of view, collaboratively identifying which values to prioritise when designing technologies.

Additionally, it allows them to express their reasonings and to consider other ways of thinking about and looking at the same situation, challenge or question. Having all these voices when designing technology will strengthen the development of such systems that highly impact people’s lives.

Since human actions and decisions are shaped by values, and technology both embodies and influences these values, VSD has been increasingly used as a key approach to incorporate values into technology design. However, this approach has been criticised for focusing on fixed moral values, restricting stakeholder engagement and flexibility, and struggling to capture values that emerge during technology use, which might not be sufficiently represented by predetermined lists.

Signo addresses this challenge by providing a flexible way to explore values at every stage of the design process, as it can be played before, during, and after technology development, thus encouraging continuous reflections, discussions, and adaptations as values evolve. Additionally, it has the potential of promoting a participatory and collaborative approach, creating a shared space for enabling the diverse voices that affect and are affected by the technology, especially in the healthcare context.

We co-designed and tested Signo using a participatory approach, inviting Human-Computer Interaction researchers, designers, engineers, data scientists, philosophers and healthcare professionals. First, we conducted observations and interviews with 9 healthcare professionals to identify which and how values influence and impact clinical decision-making, patients’ expectations and needs, and AI-powered technology use, appropriation and adoption, which allowed us to create the game’s scenario and value cards.

Then, to ensure Signo’s effectiveness, we ran two validation sessions with four Human-Centred Design experts. After refining the tool, we led three workshops with 14 participants, including designers, engineers, philosophers, and healthcare professionals, to see how it worked in practice. From there, we noticed Signo’s potential to spark meaningful conversations, encourage active collaboration, and foster continuous reflection around technology design.

We designed Signo to be adaptable and flexible, allowing users to appropriate it as they see fit. Inspired by the “Philographics” project by Studio Carreras, Signo’s abstract graphic design intentionally avoids literal representations, as its evocative illustrations stimulate diverse interpretations and perspectives, steering away from figurative imagery and allowing players to interpret values in personal and context-specific ways. Moreover, while testing the tool, we noticed that the game board should have a considerable size, offering space to accommodate the abundance of elicited values.

Signo includes five components: a game board with two axes open to interpretation for mapping values; 110 value cards plus blank ones for adding new values; 15 scenario cards presenting various situations where players apply values; profile tokens representing six roles like designers and patients to highlight relevant values; and polar tokens to show if a value is viewed positively or negatively depending on context.

Players can also use these tokens to make arithmetic connections between values (e.g., adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing values near each other). Signo’s tangible and flexible design encouraged face-to-face conversation, shared understanding, and context-sensitive value reflection. The game consistently supported players eliciting, prioritising, and mapping values in thoughtful, inclusive and ethical ways, making it a valid tool for human-centred and value-sensitive approaches to design technology.