Anti-Hero Card Deck with Hero Counterparts and Action Cards.

As deceptive design practices proliferate on technology platforms and increasingly threaten user agency and well-being, concerned online communities are using social media platforms to discuss and challenge these unethical practices. In this paper, we conducted a case study analysis of two subreddits, r/privacy and r/assholedesign, to investigate the kinds of ethical concerns expressed within both subreddits, the strategies employed to express those concerns, the goals participants hoped to achieve through participation, and the community infrastructure these communities created to support their collective action against technology manipulation. Our findings show that posts on these subreddits employ different strategies to discuss ethical and value-related issues, revealing instances where community members engage in ethics ''by other means''-raising attention to problematic practices, identifying workarounds, and encouraging activism. The findings also showed that members of both communities transformed individual frustrations with technology manipulation into collective ethical action, involving value contestation and interaction criticism of problematic technology artifacts mediated by the socio-technical community infrastructure they designed to support these objectives. We conclude by highlighting opportunities for CSCW scholars to further encourage user engagement with technology ethics concepts by considering the role of community infrastructure and the different rhetoric of ethics that express different combinations of values and desired outcomes.

Design and technology practitioners are increasingly aware of the ethical impact of their work practices, desiring tools to support their ethical awareness across a range of contexts. In this paper, we report on findings from a series of six co-creation workshops with 26 technology and design practitioners that supported their creation of a bespoke ethics-focused action plan. Using a qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis approach, we identified a range of roles and process moves that practitioners and design students with professional experience employed and illustrate the interplay of these elements that impacted the creation of their action plan and revealed aspects of their ethical design complexity. We conclude with implications for supporting ethics in socio-technical practice and opportunities for the further development of methods that support ethical engagement and are resonant with the realities of practice.

Numerous methods and tools have been proposed to motivate or support ethical awareness in design practice. However, many existing resources are not easily discoverable by practitioners, and are often framed using language that is not accessible or resonant with everyday practice. In this paper, we present three complementary strands of work with the goal of increasing the ability of design and technology practitioners to locate and activate methods to support ethically-focused work practices. We first constructed a set of empirically-supported “intentions” to frame practitioners’ selection of relevant ethics-focused methods based on interviews with practitioners from a range of technology and design professions. We then leveraged these intentions in the design and iterative evaluation of a website that supports practitioners in identifying opportunities for ethics-focused action. Building on these findings, we propose a set of design considerations to evaluate the practice resonance of resources in supporting ethics-focused practice, laying the groundwork for increased ecological resonance of ethics-focused methods and method selection tools.

HCI and STS researchers have previously described the ethical complexity of practice, drawing together aspects of organizational complexity, design knowledge, and ethical frameworks. Building on this work, we investigate the identity claims and beliefs that impact practitioners’ ability to recognize and act upon ethical concerns in a range of technology-focused disciplines. In this paper, we report results from an interview study with 12 practitioners, identifying and describing their identity claims related to ethical awareness and action. We conducted a critically-focused thematic analysis to identify eight distinct claims representing roles relating to learning, educating, following policies, feeling a sense of responsibility, being a member of a profession, a translator, an activist, and deliberative. Based on our findings, we demonstrate how the claims foreground building competence in relation to ethical practice. We highlight the dynamic interplay among these claims and point towards implications for identity work in socio-technical contexts.

In conjunction with the increasing ubiquity of technology, computing educators have identified the need for pedagogical engagement with ethical awareness and moral reasoning. Typical approaches to incorporating ethics in computing curricula have focused primarily on abstract methods, principles, or paradigms of ethical reasoning, with relatively little focus on examining and developing students’ pragmatic awareness of ethics as grounded in their everyday work practices. In this paper, we identify and describe computing students’ negotiation of values as they engage in authentic design problems through a lab protocol study. We collected data from four groups of three students each, with each group including participants from either undergraduate User Experience Design students, Industrial Engineering students, or a mix of both. We used a thematic analysis approach to identify the roles that students took on to address the design prompt. Through our analysis, we found that the students took on a variety of “dark” roles that resulted in manipulation of the user and prioritization of stakeholder needs over user needs, with a focus either on building solutions or building rationale for design decisions. We found these roles to actively propagate through design discourses, impacting other designers in ways that frequently reinforced unethical decision making. Even when students were aware of ethical concerns based on their educational training, this awareness did not consistently result in ethically-sound decisions. These findings indicate the need for additional ethical supports to inform everyday computing practice, including means of actively identifying and balancing negative societal impacts of design decisions. The roles we have identified may productively support the development of pragmatically-focused ethical training in computing education, while adding more precision to future analysis of computing student discourses and outputs.

Abstract Online services have become increasingly centralized, drawing on notions of the ‘platform economy’ to focus on ecosystem value rather than user value. In parallel, there have been efforts by developers to augment these platforms, empowering platform users in the process. We explored a 12-month participatory-action project, focusing on redesigning portions of Just Eat, an online aggregator for takeaway food ordering, building upon theoretical perspectives from public health and Digital Civics. We document our experiences in identifying user behaviours and motivations across multiple design workshops, including the design of a web-augmentation–based template to disrupt platform provider behaviours, empower service users and increase individual agency. Through this case study, we identify opportunities and mechanisms for platform modification, linking augmentation to adversarial design with outcomes that have the potential to improve the well-being of platform users.

Scholars have previously described how online communities engage in particular discourses and forms of argumentation. In parallel, HCI and STS researchers have described discourses surrounding ethics and values and their role in shaping design processes and outcomes. However, little work has addressed the intersection of ethical concern and the discourses of non-expert users. In this paper, we describe the argumentation strategies used by Redditors on the subreddit 'r/assholedesign' as they discuss ethically problematic design artifacts. We used content and sequence analysis methods to identify the building blocks of ethical argumentation in this online community, including ethical positioning when raising issues of concern, identification of potential remedies to the original design artifact or issues of concern, and means of extending or negating these elements. Through this analysis, we reveal the breadth of ethical argumentation strategies used "in-the-wild" by non-experts, resulting in an increased awareness of the capacity of community members to engage in "everyday ethics" regardless of specific ethics training. We describe future opportunities to connect these ethical argumentation strategies with design practices, education, and methods.

Manipulation defines many of our experiences as a consumer, including subtle nudges and overt advertising campaigns that seek to gain our attention and money. With the advent of digital services that can continuously optimize online experiences to favor stakeholder requirements, increasingly designers and developers make use of "dark patterns"-forms of manipulation that prey on human psychology-to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others in ways that present unequal value to the end user. In this paper, we provide an account of end user perceptions of manipulation that builds on and extends notions of dark patterns. We report on the results of a survey of users conducted in English and Mandarin Chinese (n=169), including follow-up interviews from nine survey respondents. We used a card sorting method to support thematic analysis of responses from each cultural context, identifying both qualitatively-supported insights to describe end users' felt experiences of manipulative products and a continuum of manipulation. We further support this analysis through a descriptive analysis of survey results and the presentation of examples from the interviews. We conclude with implications for future research, considerations for public policy, and guidance on how to further empower and give users autonomy in their experiences with digital services.

Design practitioners are increasingly engaged in describing ethical complexity in their everyday work, exemplified by concepts such as "dark patterns" and "dark UX." In parallel, researchers have shown how interactions and discourses in online communities allow access to the various dimensions of design complexity in practice. In this paper, we conducted a content analysis of the subreddit "/r/assholedesign," identifying how users on Reddit engage in conversation about ethical concerns. We identify what types of artifacts are shared, and the salient ethical concerns that community members link with "asshole" behaviors. Based on our analysis, we propose properties that describe "asshole designers," both distinct and in relation to dark patterns, and point towards an anthropomorphization of ethics that foregrounds the inscription of designer's values into designed outcomes. We conclude with opportunities for further engagement with ethical complexity in online and offline contexts, stimulating ethics-focused conversations among social media users and design practitioners.

HCI researchers are increasingly interested in describing the complexity of design practice, including ethical, organizational, and societal concerns. Recent studies have identified individual practitioners as key actors in driving the design process and culture within their respective organizations, and we build upon these efforts to reveal practitioner concerns regarding ethics on their own terms. In this paper, we report on the results of an interview study with eleven UX practitioners, capturing their experiences that highlight dimensions of design practice that impact ethical awareness and action. Using a bottom-up thematic analysis, we identified five dimensions of design complexity that influence ethical outcomes and span individual, collaborative, and methodological framing of UX activity. Based on these findings, we propose a set of implications for the creation of ethically-centered design methods that resonate with this complexity and inform the education of future UX practitioners.

HCI scholarship is increasingly concerned with the ethical impact of socio-technical systems. Current theoretically driven approaches that engage with ethics generally prescribe only abstract approaches by which designers might consider values in the design process. However, there is little guidance on methods that promote value discovery, which might lead to more specific examples of relevant values in specific design contexts. In this paper, we elaborate a method for value discovery, identifying how values impact the designer's decision making. We demonstrate the use of this method, called Ethicography, in describing value discovery and use throughout the design process. We present analysis of design activity by user experience (UX) design students in two lab protocol conditions, describing specific human values that designers considered for each task, and visualizing the interplay of these values. We identify opportunities for further research, using the Ethicograph method to illustrate value discovery and translation into design solutions.

HCI scholars have become increasingly interested in describing the complex nature of UX practice. In parallel, HCI and STS scholars have sought to describe the ethical and value-laden relationship between designers and design outcomes. However, little research describes the ethical engagement of UX practitioners as a form of design complexity, including the multiple mediating factors that impact ethical awareness and decision-making. In this paper, we use a practice-led approach to describe ethical complexity, presenting three varied cases of UX practitioners based onin situ observations and interviews. In each case, we describe salient factors relating to ethical mediation, including organizational practices, self-driven ethical principles, and unique characteristics of specific projects the practitioner is engaged in. Using the concept of mediation from activity theory, we provide a rich account of practitioners' ethical decision making. We propose future work on ethical awareness and design education based on the concept of ethical mediation.