HCFeb 17, 2021
Surveying the Landscape of Ethics-Focused Design MethodsShruthi Sai Chivukula, Ziqing Li, Anne C. Pivonka et al.
Over the past decade, HCI researchers, design researchers, and practitioners have increasingly addressed ethics-focused issues through a range of theoretical, methodological and pragmatic contributions to the field. While many forms of design knowledge have been proposed and described, we focus explicitly on knowledge that has been codified as "methods," which we define as any supports for everyday work practices of designers. In this paper, we identify, analyze, and map a collection of 63 existing ethics-focused methods intentionally designed for ethical impact. We present a content analysis, providing a descriptive record of how they operationalize ethics, their intended audience or context of use, their "core" or "script," and the means by which these methods are formulated, articulated, and languaged. Building on these results, we provide an initial definition of ethics-focused methods, identifying potential opportunities for the development of future methods to support design practice and research.
HCOct 21, 2020
End User Accounts of Dark Patterns as Felt ManipulationColin M. Gray, Jingle Chen, Shruthi Sai Chivukula et al.
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 quantitative analysis of survey results and the presentation of vignettes 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.