The Square of Values for Modeling Human Values in Requirements Engineering

Software systems are increasingly interwoven with human lives on an individual and collective scale. With the growing relevance of software for humans, the interplay between psychological and social values of humans, and values implicitly embedded in software systems, becomes increasingly relevant. Software system design has to take into account how values are reflected and incorporated in system design, and apply methodical means to consciously reason about the psychological and social values that are embedded implicitly or explicitly in software. In this paper we present the Square of Values modeling approach for visually explicating value constellations in ethical system design. We describe the results of a study with students of information science and business informatics at two European higher education institutions.