Where hidden values live

What if we started with ethnographic observations and brought in abstractions and values at a later stage? This commentary takes that question seriously, using 3 years of longitudinal fieldwork in an EU-funded urban logistics project to both confirm and extend the article's diagnostic framework of value disconnects. A single cargo bike, deployed, broken down, tinkered with, demonstrated and eventually stashed away in a depot, turns out to be a productive lens for understanding where values in technology projects actually live: not in the systems designed to hold them, nor in the principles declared to guide them, but in the informal, embodied and often ephemeral practices that gather around technologies as they move through the world. The commentary confirms the article's five disconnects and proposes a sixth, value dispersal, alongside a pedagogical argument for why noticing it requires a fundamentally different kind of methodological training than technology development currently offers.

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Publication Details

Journal
Dialogues on Digital Society
Published
2026-08-26
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/29768640261483361
Primary Topic
Information Systems Theories and Implementation
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Where hidden values live

Vaike Fors
Dialogues on Digital Society
Information Systems Theories and Implementation
article

Where hidden values live

Vaike Fors
article en

Abstract

What if we started with ethnographic observations and brought in abstractions and values at a later stage? This commentary takes that question seriously, using 3 years of longitudinal fieldwork in an EU-funded urban logistics project to both confirm and extend the article's diagnostic framework of value disconnects. A single cargo bike, deployed, broken down, tinkered with, demonstrated and eventually stashed away in a depot, turns out to be a productive lens for understanding where values in technology projects actually live: not in the systems designed to hold them, nor in the principles declared to guide them, but in the informal, embodied and often ephemeral practices that gather around technologies as they move through the world. The commentary confirms the article's five disconnects and proposes a sixth, value dispersal, alongside a pedagogical argument for why noticing it requires a fundamentally different kind of methodological training than technology development currently offers.

Dialogues on Digital Society
Halmstad University (SE)
Sustainable cities and communities
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
Information Systems Theories and Implementation
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Where hidden values live — Vaike Fors · Dialogues on Digital Society (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS