Design is an important aspect in the systems engineering life cycle, as well as a field of study in its own right. Design is an important consideration in the pragmatic sense, addressing the need to craft artifacts and systems that meet functional specifications. Perhaps most of technological design has classically focused on this aspect, which is usually governed by rigorous engineering theory, with metrics such as reliability and cost. Good design in this sense is often sought by following explicitly defined practices.

Increasingly, in the context of user experience (UX) design, human-computer interaction (HCI), and similar issues, it is clearly seen that classical engineering approaches to design are not adequate; it is essential to consider nonfunctional aspects such as esthetics (including such mundane aspects as font choices, sizes, and colors), cognitive loads on humans, ease of interaction and use, and so on.

This book is a relatively short monograph in five chapters (some 180-odd pages of content, excluding prefaces, appendices, and so on), presenting a quick summary of the work that the authors and their many collaborators have done over the past couple of decades on the concept of “value-sensitive design,” which can be described as design principles and practices that uphold moral and esthetic values. The chapters are presented in a rather straightforward fashion: “Introduction,” “Theory,” “Method,” “Applications,” and “Conclusion.”

The book is a welcome addition to the growing literature that melds the humanities and social sciences with engineering design in general and software engineering in particular. My major complaint about the book is that the authors use a summary style of writing throughout, with references given to various prior papers but not enough detail given to understand what is being said. For instance, on page 65, we see a description of “reflections on direct and indirect stakeholders”: “Discussion and reflection on the conceptual categories of direct and indirect stakeholders as well as limitations (Nathan et al., 2008).” This sort of description is simply not understandable unless the reader has also gathered up a substantive amount of the prior literature cited and uses this book merely as an extended abstract to look up the relevant other literature and study the latter in detail. This writing style thus requires more work on the part of the reader to make sense of it and is markedly different from other influential works on design, such as those of Norman [1] and Leveson [2], which are largely self-contained.

The book features interesting photographs of various tools (hammer, mallet, and so on) and what appear to be pieces of art carved in stone. However, they are not given in context and the reader is left to guess what the authors’ point may be in including these.

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