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Ethics as embodied by technology practitioners resists simple definition—particularly as it relates to the interplay of identity, organizational, and professional complexity. In this paper we use the linguistic notion of languaging as an analytic lens to describe how technology and design practitioners negotiate their conception of ethics as they reflect upon their everyday work. We engaged twelve practitioners in individual co-creation workshops, encouraging them to reflect on their ethical role in their everyday work through a series of generative and evaluative activities. We analyzed these data to identify how each practitioner reasoned about ethics through language and artifacts, finding that practitioners used a range of rhetorical tropes to describe their ethical commitments and beliefs in ways that were complex and sometimes contradictory. Across three cases, we describe how ethics was negotiated through language across three key zones of ecological emergence: the practitioner’s “core” beliefs about ethics, internal and external ecological elements that shaped or mediated these core beliefs, and the ultimate boundaries they reported refusing to cross. Building on these findings, we describe how the languaging of ethics reveals opportunities to definitionally and practically engage with ethics in technology ethics research, practice, and education. 

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. 

Ethical engagement is central to the practice of design, impacting stakeholders across and beyond technology organizations as well as producing downstream social and environmental impacts. Scholars have previously described the ecologically-mediated nature of ethics in practice as a manifestation of “ethical design complexity;” however, the means of addressing this complexity is under-explored. In this provocation, we build on three years of prior empirical work on ethics and design practice to propose three ways of “wrangling” ethical design complexity: 1) articulating and interrogating complexity through constructed ethical dilemmas; 2) identifying potentially binding constraints through ethical tensions; and 3) describing and traversing naturalistically-defined ethical situations. We leverage these three approaches to provoke further scholarship and ethically-engaged design work. 

Dark patterns are increasingly ubiquitous in digital services and regulation, describing instances where designers use deceptive, manipulative, or coercive tactics to encourage end users to make decisions that are not in their best interest. Research regarding dark patterns has also increased significantly over the past several years. In this systematic review, we evaluate literature (n=79) from 2014 to 2022 that has empirically described dark patterns in order to identify the presence, impact, or user experience of these patterns as they appear in digital systems. Based on our analysis, we identify key areas of current interest in evaluating dark patterns’ context, presence, and impact; describe common disciplinary perspectives and framing concepts; characterize dominant methodologies; and outline opportunities for further methodological support and scholarship to empower scholars, designers, and regulators. 

The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems involves a significant level of judgment and decision making on the part of engineers and designers to ensure the safety, robustness, and ethical design of such systems. However, the kinds of judgments that practitioners employ while developing AI platforms are rarely foregrounded or examined to explore areas practitioners might need ethical support. In this short paper, we employ the concept of design judgment to foreground and examine the kinds of sensemaking software engineers use to inform their decisionmaking while developing AI systems. Relying on data generated from two exploratory observation studies of student software engineers, we connect the concept of fairness to the foregrounded judgments to implicate their potential algorithmic fairness impacts. Our findings surface some ways in which the design judgment of software engineers could adversely impact the downstream goal of ensuring fairness in AI systems. We discuss the implications of these findings in fostering positive innovation and enhancing fairness in AI systems, drawing attention to the need to provide ethical guidance, support, or intervention to practitioners as they engage in situated and contextual judgments while developing AI systems. 

In an era of ubiquitous digital interfaces and systems, technology and design practitioners must address a range of ethical dilemmas surrounding the use of persuasive design techniques and how to balance shareholder and end-user needs [2], [5]. Similarly, the increasing user concerns about unethical products and services [1] is paralleling a rise in regulatory interests in enforcing ethical design and engineering practices among technology practitioners, surfacing a need for further support. Although various scholars have developed frameworks and methods to support practitioners in navigating these challenging contexts [3], [4], often, there is a lack of resonance between these generic methods and the situated ethical complexities facing the practitioner in their everyday work. In this project, we designed and implemented a three-hour cocreation workshop with designers, engineers, and technologists to support them to develop bespoke ethics-focused action plans that are resonant with the ethical challenges they face in their everyday practice. In developing the co-creation session, we sought to answer the following questions to empower practitioners: • How can we support practitioners in developing action plans to address ethical dilemmas in their everyday work? and • How can we empower designers to design more responsibly? Building on these questions as a guide, we employed Miro, a digital whiteboard platform, to develop the co-creation experience. The final c o-creation e xperience w as d esigned w ith the visual metaphor of a “house” with four floors and multiple rooms that allowed participants to complete different tasks per room, all aimed towards the overall goal of developing participants' own personalized action plan in an interactive and collaborative way. We invited participants to share their stories and ethical dilemmas to support their creation and iteration of a personal action plan that they could later use in their everyday work context. Across the six co-creation sessions we conducted, participants (n=26) gained a better understanding of the drivers for ethical action in the context of their everyday work and developed an action plan through the co-creation workshop that enabled them to constructively engage with ethical challenges in their professional context. At the end of the session, participants were provided the action plans they created to allow them to use it in their practice. Furthermore, the co-design workshops were designed such that practitioners could take them away (the house and session guide) and run them independently at their organization or another context to support their objectives. We describe the building and the activities conducted in each floor below and will provide a pictorial representation of the house with the different floors, rooms, and activities on the poster presentation. a) First floor-Welcome, Introduction, Reflection: The first floor of the virtual house was designed to allow participants to introduce themselves and to reflect on and discuss the ethical concerns they wished to resolve during the session. b) Second floor-Shopping for ethics-focused methods: The second floor of the virtual house was designed as a “shopping” space where participants selected from range of ethicsfocused building blocks that they wish to potentially adapt or incorporate into their own action plan. They were also allowed to introduce their own methods or tools. c) Third floor-DIY Workspace: The third floor was designed as a DIY workspace to allow the participants to work in small groups to develop their own bespoke action plan based on building blocks they have gathered from their shopping trip and by using any other components they wish. The goal here was to support participants in developing methods and action plans that were resonant with their situated ethical complexities. d) Fourth floor-Gallery Space: The fourth floor was designed as a gallery to allow participants to share and discuss their action plans with other participants and to identify how their action plans could impact their future practice or educational experiences. Participants were also provided an opportunity at this stage to reflect on their experience participating in the session and provide feedback on opportunities for future improvement. 

Technology ethics is increasingly at the forefront of human-computer interaction scholarship, with increasing visibility not only to end users of technology, but also regulators, technology practitioners, and platforms. The notion of “dark patterns” has emerged as one common framing of technology manipulation, describing instances where psychological or perceptual tricks are used to decrease user agency and autonomy. In this panel, we have assembled a group of highly diverse early-career scholars that have built a transdisciplinary approach to scholarship on dark patterns, engaging with a range of socio-technical approaches and perspectives. Panelists will discuss their methodological approaches, key research questions to be considered in this emerging area of scholarship, and necessary connections between and among disciplinary perspectives to engage with the diverse constituencies that frame the creation, use, and impacts of dark patterns. 

Deceptive design practices are increasingly used by companies to extract profit, harvest data, and limit consumer choice. Dark patterns represent the most common contemporary amalgamation of these problematic practices, connecting designers, technologists, scholars, regulators, and legal professionals in transdisciplinary dialogue. However, a lack of universally accepted definitions across the academic, legislative and regulatory space has likely limited the impact that scholarship on dark patterns might have in supporting sanctions and evolved design practices. In this late breaking work, we seek to harmonize regulatory and academic taxonomies of dark patterns, proposing a preliminary three-level ontology to create a shared language that supports translational research and regulatory action. We identify potential directions for scholarship and social impact building upon this ontology. 

Growth hacking, particularly within the spectre of surveillance capitalism, has led to the widespread use of deceptive, manipulative, and coercive design techniques in the last decade. These challenges exist at the intersection of many diferent technology professions that are rapidly evolving and “shapeshifting” their design practices to confront emerging regulation. A wide range of scholars have increasingly addressed these challenges through the label “dark patterns,” describing the content of deceptive and coercive design practices, the ubiquity of these patterns in contemporary digital systems, and the impact of emerging regulatory and legislative action on the presence of dark patterns. Building on this convergent and trans-disciplinary research area, the aims of this SIG are to: 1) Provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to address methodologies for detecting, characterizing, and regulating dark patterns; 2) Identify opportunities for additional empirical work to characterize and demonstrate harms related to dark patterns; and 3) Aid in convergence among HCI, design, computational, regulatory, and legal perspectives on dark patterns. These goals will enable an internationally-diverse, engaged, and impactful research community to address the threats of dark patterns on digital systems. 

Design students must develop competence in a wide range of areas in order to be successful in their future practice. Increasingly, knowledge of design methods is used to frame both a designer’s repertoire and their overall facility as a designer. However, there is little research on how students build cognitive schema in relation to design methods or how these schema relate to specific epistemological patterns of engagement. In this research paper, we report a multiple case study, capturing the experiences of four advanced undergraduate UX design students at a large research-intensive institution. Through an interview study and subsequent analysis, we describe the wide variety of organizing metaphors that these students used to frame their understanding and performance of design methods, including both principles they used to consider methods as knowledge, and the ways in which these organizing principles impacted their practice of design. We conclude with recommendations for further research on the uptake of methods-focused competence in HCI education and practice.