Description:

Deceptive designs, or “dark patterns”, refers to verbal and visual language in the interface design of apps and websites designed to obscure or impair consumer autonomy or choice and alter decision-making to lead us towards actions we might not otherwise take. Like when companies make it easy to subscribe to a service but near-impossible to cancel. Or when you have to jump through endless hoops to tell a service not to scoop up and sell your personal data.

Deceptive designs jeopardize digital protections of online populations, especially those at risk. They reinforce a cyber norm that puts people’s personal data and assets at risk, attenuate trust, and further deprive agency from communities who are already marginalised. Moreover, deceptive designs compound the inequality between regions and communities in developments by disproportionately impacting those with less tools and channels to defend themselves. What makes this issue tricky to mitigate is that the language we use to address deceptive designs mean different things to a variety of stakeholder groups in their own contexts. Many people — such as children and teens, the elderly, or disadvantaged communities — don’t have the necessary information and aid to discern “trustworthy” or "responsible" designs from manipulative ones when they use these digital tools, services, and platforms.

One of our key findings in a series of workshops and dialogues between professionals from policy, business, design, and advocacy backgrounds is the disconnection between policy development, design education, and public discourses. In addition, there is a major lack in incentives and business interest to invest in responsible design practices. As lawmakers move to clamp down on manipulative and deceptive designs, multi-stakeholder collaborations are in dire need to build guidelines and benchmarks for what responsible designs look like as part of a wider shift towards a future for people to take back control over their own data and online properties.

This session invites everyone — policymakers, civic technologists, experts in both the public and private sectors, designers and digital product teams, and the people of the internet. We aim at brewing an effective synergetic approach that connects the efforts across sectors to enable a continuing channel to learn directly from those affected by technology. We hope participants will leave this session with directions for systematic interventions that combine policy change with public advocacy and design education.

We need the designs that shape the digital world and online experiences to be responsible for people no matter who and where they are to live their lives online with dignity, autonomy, and a sense of trust. We urgently call for an integrated solution that mobilise governments, companies, tool developers, and design practitioners to centre human rights and digital protection and explore responsible design solutions at scale.