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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. 

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.