Understanding Aspirational Goals of a Religious Community to Inform Values-In Design: Drawing on Religious Teachings

Religious beliefs profoundly shape how people live, connect, and engage with technology, yet remain underexplored within CHI and CSCW research. This paper examines how institutional religious teachings can serve as a site of value articulation for values-in-design research by revealing aspirational goals for technology use in a specific faith community. Through qualitative thematic analysis of 18 years of sermons from leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we find that technology is framed as both beneficial and potentially harmful, depending on whether it serves or distracts from spiritual goals. This overarching orientation—technology should serve spiritual goals rather than distract from them—manifests in domains such as personal habits, relationships, service, and global outreach. We reflect on the methodological and ethical challenges of grounding values-in-design research in top-down religious teachings. Our findings contribute to CSCW’s interest in community-informed values-in-design research by illustrating how institutional religious teachings can be leveraged to surface recurring value concerns in religious contexts.