Taking Universal Perspective in Design: A Plea for Two Reflective Principles and Mechanisms

Current approaches to the design of interactive systems emphasize openness, dynamic behavior, and evolution of the system. There is also a growing interest in accounting for human values and norms. This paper takes a universal perspective informed by discourse ethics and it argues that value and norm issues cannot be fully resolved in the design process and that they require the continuous participation of users in use time. On the other hand, the increasing complexity in global contexts necessitates exploiting machine intelligence to adapt the system behavior to the interaction context. This paper comments on two complementary reflective principles for interactive systems (i.e., the meta-adaptation and meta-communication principles) and argues that both principles need to be implemented as system´s features to support computer´s as well as users´ reflections.