IGF 2023 Launch / Award Event #169 Design Beyond Deception: A Manual for Design Practitioners

Deceptive design, commonly known as “dark patterns'' obscure or impair consumer autonomy or choice and trick users into taking actions that they may not otherwise take. Deceptive designs have a disproportionate impact on marginalised communities, including senior citizens, women and gender minorities, children, families with lower incomes, and people who are less digitally connected, particularly in the Global South. These design choices undermine privacy, consumer protection, and trust in online products and services. 2022 was a crucial year for deceptive design regulation as policymakers in different countries began to take notice of deceptive practices. Important examples are the Federal Trade Commission in the US highlighting the rise in deceptive design and the European Union publishing the Digital Services Act, which includes laws that tackle deceptive design. Consumer councils worldwide have begun to take up deceptive design as a problem that actively harms consumers and sought to understand how current laws can be adapted to ensure consumer protection in the digital economy. Digital antitrust initiatives in multiple regulations have also touched on the challenges involving deceptive design. While academic literature focuses on sorting, creating taxonomies and finding evidence of deceptive design on the internet, practitioners such as designers within technology-building ecosystems remain largely unaware of the harms caused by their daily practice. There is need for further research that informs practitioners about more responsible, ethical and trusted design practices. Studies have shown that designers are crucial actors in technology and product development processes, with designers values flowing into the technological artefacts they build. It is crucial, therefore, to see designers as key stakeholders in deceptive design practices, who are central to building a safe and trusted web. In the past year, researchers at The Pranava Institute have been holding consultations with global experts in HCI, human-centered design, privacy and data protection and civil society to create a manual for design practitioners using a five-step methodology which helps them tackle deception in practice. Supported by the University of Notre Dame and IBM’s Tech Ethics Lab, the Design Beyond Deception project seeks to create a manual of ethical design which can be used by designers independently, in teams, or within their workplace to create safe and trusted digital environments and experiences. Rooted in multi-disciplinary academic work, practitioner-lead research, and interviews with global experts, the manual provides frameworks, questions, reflections, values and visual prototypes to help create alternatives to current practices. We seek to launch this manual at the IGF 2023 in order to involve the larger research and practitioner community, and share our work for the benefit of all. Project website: https://design.pranavainstitute.com Access the manual here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DRWhMyd4w2SMmXNISMPORJRikYOMoxUY/view?…

1. While the manual to be launched is focussed towards design practitioners, we seek to engage the wider IGF community on deceptive design as a crucial issue to ensure a safe and trustworthy internet for all. The session will encourage participants to reflect on their interactions with digital platforms and identify instances of deceptive design that impact them. In the slots for opinions and questions from the audience, the onsite moderator will be attentive to the physical queue and will ask the online moderator in the case of hands raised or written comments, in which case the questions will be allowed in a round-robin basis (that is, starting with the online hands and written chats, and then following the physical queue, and so on). The online moderator has the main task of maintaining the order of the raised hands and written chat, reading the questions, and giving the floor to online audience speakers. That way we will achieve an equal foot between the online and on-site audience. 2. The manual and help links will be shared onsite, as well as with online participants in order to make access easy. 3. Collaborative tools such as Miro will be used to gather feedback and comments from audiences, with the online moderator focussing solely on engaging the online audience through Miro, Polls and Chat storms.