This book provides the first comprehensive philosophical examination of value change. It offers both a theoretical framework for understanding value change and innovative empirical methods for studying it, paying particular attention to its implications for technological design and development.

Value change is the phenomenon that encompasses different types of transformations in how individuals and societies understand and prioritize what is valuable. The authors address three core questions: How can we conceptually understand value change? How can we empirically study it? What are its implications for technological design and development? By distinguishing between different types of value change and introducing novel research methods—including interpretative phenomenological analysis, topic modeling, and agent-based modeling—the authors provide valuable tools for scholars and practitioners alike. The book's interdisciplinary approach combines philosophical inquiry with empirical research methods, offering a robust foundation for understanding how values evolve in relation to technological and societal developments.

Understanding Value Change is essential reading for philosophers, ethicists, social scientists, and technologists interested in the intersection of ethics, technology, and social change, particularly those working in responsible innovation and value-sensitive design.

Ibo van de Poel is Professor in Ethics and Technology at the Technical University Delft, the Netherlands. He has published numerous articles and co-authored several books including Ethics, Technology and Engineering (2011), The Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies: An Introduction (2023), The Handbook of Ethics, Values, and Technological Design (2025), and Moral Responsibility and the Problem of Many Hands (Routledge, 2015).

Steffen Steinert is an Assistant Professor in the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology section at the Technical University Delft, the Netherlands. He has published numerous papers on responsible innovation and the ethics of technology. He is the author of Interdisciplinary Value Theory (2023).

Michael Klenk is Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Technology Nuremberg, Germany. He has published widely in practical philosophy on metaethics and moral epistemology, moral psychology, the ethics and philosophy of technology, as well as normative and applied ethics. He is the co-editor of The Philosophy of Online Manipulation (Routledge, 2022) and Philosophy in the Age of Science? (2020), and the editor of Higher-Order Evidence and Moral Psychology (Routledge, 2020).