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  1. null (Ed.)
  2. null (Ed.)
    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. 
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  4. Creative outcomes require designers to continuously frame the problem space and generate solutions, resulting in the co-evolution of problem and solution. Little work has addressed the value dimensions of design activity with regard to this co-evolutionary process and the role of the designer in acting upon specific and value-laden framings and/or solutions. In this paper, we identify how triads of student designers from user experience (UX) and industrial engineering (IE) disciplines frame the problem space and generate solutions, foregrounding the ethical character of their judgments in response to an ethically-nuanced design task. Using sequence analysis to analyze the lab protocol data, we describe the frequency and interconnectedness of process moves that lead the design team towards unethical outcomes. Based on our findings, we call for additional attention to ethical dimensions of problem-solution co-evolution, and identify key interaction patterns among designers that lead towards unethical outcomes. 
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  5. 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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  6. Design culture is increasingly present within organizations, especially with the rise of UX as a profession. Yet there are often disconnects between the development of a design philosophy and its translation in practice. Students preparing for UX careers are positioned in a liminal space between their educational experience and future practice, and are actively working to build a bridge between their developing philosophy of design and the translation of that philosophy when faced with the complexity of design practice. In this study, we interviewed ten students and practitioners educated within design-oriented HCI programs, focusing on their design philosophy and evaluating how their philosophical beliefs were shaped in practice. Building on prior work on flows of competence, we thematically analyzed these interviews, identifying the philosophical beliefs of these designers and their trajectories of development, adoption, or suppression in industry. We identify opportunities for enhancements to UX educational practices and future research on design complexity in industry contexts. 
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  7. 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. 
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  8. 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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  9. 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. 
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  10. 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. 
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