ENVISIONING CARDS.
A VALUE SENSITIVE DESIGN TOOLKIT
Use the Envisioning Cards to create ethical technology and improve your design practice. The 2nd Edition consists of 42 Envisioning Cards downloadable in PDF format.
DOWNLOAD & PRINT
The Envisioning Cards toolkit is available for use under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license in three PDF versions:
- Double-sided printing and cutting (26 MB)
- Single-sided printing and cutting (17 MB)
- Single-sided printing (16 MB)
- Professional printing (426 MB)
BUY FROM BOOKSTORE
The Envisioning Cards toolkit is available at the University of Washington Book Store. The premade toolkit can be shipped or picked up at the store.
- Buy the premade Envisioning Cards ($21.00 US)
ABOUT THE ENVISIONING CARDS
This second edition of the Envisioning Cards brings together under one cohesive design the original set of 32 Envisioning Cards published in 2011 including the four suits—Stakeholders, Time, Values, and Pervasiveness—with the supplementary set of 13 Envisioning Cards published in 2018 with the Multi-lifespan suit. The second edition preserves all the cards. In the second edition, all five suits now appear on each card and slight changes have been made to the text on some cards; the images are unchanged. On some cards the examples of stakeholders have been broadened beyond human beings (e.g., humpback whales, oceans, space). There is now a single “Create your Own” card which supports making new cards for any of the five suits as well as opens the opportunity to create your own suit.
Citation: Batya Friedman, Lisa Nathan, Shaun Kane, John Lin, Daisy Yoo, Nick Logler, Stephanie Ballard, and David G. Hendry. Envisioning Cards: A Value Sensitive Design Toolkit (2nd Edition). Seattle, WA: University of Washington, 2024. https://envisioningcards.vsdesign.org
FURTHER READING
Friedman, B., and Hendry, D. G. (2019). Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Friedman, B. and Hendry, D. G. (2012). The Envisioning Cards: A toolkit for catalyzing humanistic and technical imagination. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12) (pp. 1145-1148). New York, NY: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208562
Friedman, B., and Nathan, L. P. (2010). Multi-lifespan information system design: A research initiative for the HCI community. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2243-2246). New York, NY: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753665
Nathan, L. P., Friedman, B., Klasnja, P., Kane, S., and Miller, J. K. (2008). Envisioning systemic effects on persons and society throughout interactive system design. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ‘08) (pp. 1-10). New York, NY: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/1394445.1394446
Yoo, D., Logler, N., Ballard, S., and Friedman, B. (2022). Multi-lifespan Envisioning Cards: Journeying from design theory to tools for action. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '22) (pp. 557-570). New York, NY: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533495
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Developed by the Value Sensitive Design Lab, The Information School, University of Washington.
Authors: Batya Friedman, Lisa Nathan, Shaun Kane, John Lin, Daisy Yoo, Nick Logler, Stephanie Ballard, and David G. Hendry
Advisors: Gail Dykstra, Adam Krynicki, and Richard Mander
Photos: Maxwell Andrews, Batya Friedman, Nell Carden Grey, and Mark Ring
Graphic Design: Daisy Fry, Elias Greendorfer, and Daisy Yoo
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. IIS-0325035 and IIS-1302709. The original card decks were produced with funds from The Washington Research Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.
© 2011-2025 University of Washington, Value Sensitive Design Lab. https://vsdesign.org
HOW TO CONTACT US
Questions, comments, or reports? Tell us how you are using the Envisioning Cards. We would love to hear from you. Write us at: vsdesign [at] uw.edu.