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.
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"Nothing Comes Before Profit": Asshole Design In the Wild
Researchers in HCI and STS are increasingly interested in describing ethics and values relevant for design practice, including the formulation of methods to guide value application. However, little work has addressed ethical considerations as they emerge in everyday conversations about ethics in venues such as social media. In this late breaking work, we describe online conversations about a concept known as "asshole design" on Reddit, and the relationship of this concept to another practitioner-focused concept known as "dark patterns." We analyzed 1002 posts from the subreddit '/r/assholedesign' to identify the types of artifact being shared and the interaction purposes that were perceived to be manipulative or unethical as a type of "asshole design." We identified a subset of these posts relating to dark patterns, quantifying their occurrences using an existing dark patterns typology.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1657310
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10092727
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '19
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 6
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312863
