What Kind of Work Do "Asshole Designers" Create? Describing Properties of Ethical Concern on Reddit

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.

[1]  Sebastian Boring,et al.  Dark patterns in proxemic interactions: a critical perspective , 2014, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[2]  Colin M. Gray,et al.  The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design , 2018, CHI.

[3]  Colin M. Gray,et al.  #darkpatterns: UX Practitioner Conversations About Ethical Design , 2018, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[4]  Alan Borning,et al.  Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems , 2020, The Ethics of Information Technologies.

[5]  Anders Albrechtslund,et al.  Ethics and technology design , 2007, Ethics and Information Technology.

[6]  Susan Wyche,et al.  Values as lived experience: evolving value sensitive design in support of value discovery , 2009, CHI.

[7]  P. Verbeek.  What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design , 2005 .

[8]  Peter Buwert.  Examining the Professional Codes of Design Organisations , 2018, DRS2018: Catalyst.

[9]  Elizabeth Goodman,et al.  Design and ethics in the era of big data , 2014, INTR.

[10]  Chris Nodder,et al.  Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us into Temptation , 2013 .

[11]  Christopher Frauenberger,et al.  Research Ethics in HCI: A Town Hall Meeting , 2017, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[12]  Deborah E. White,et al.  Thematic Analysis , 2017 .

[13]  B. Nardi,et al.  Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method , 2012 .

[14]  Kimberly A. Neuendorf,et al.  The Content Analysis Guidebook , 2001 .

[15]  Alain Findeli.  Rethinking Design Education for the 21st Century: Theoretical, Methodological, and Ethical Discussion , 2001, Design Issues.

[16]  Phoebe Sengers,et al.  Reflective design , 2005, Critical Computing.

[17]  B. J. Fogg,et al.  A behavior model for persuasive design , 2009, Persuasive '09.

[18]  Nathan Crilly,et al.  Do Users Know What Designers Are Up To? Product Experience and the Inference of Persuasive Intentions , 2011 .

[19]  Christopher Frauenberger,et al.  In-Action Ethics , 2016, Interact. Comput..

[20]  Larissa Hjorth,et al.  Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice , 2015 .

[21]  Erik Stolterman,et al.  The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World , 2002 .

[22]  Jeffrey Bardzell,et al.  Interaction criticism: An introduction to the practice , 2011, Interact. Comput..

[23]  K. Himma.  The Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics , 2007 .

[24]  Johan Redström,et al.  Switch! Energy Ecologies in Everyday Life , 2008 .

[25]  Paul Hekkert,et al.  Design for Socially Responsible Behavior: A Classification of Influence Based on Intended User Experience , 2011, Design Issues.

[26]  Daniel Fallman,et al.  The new good: exploring the potential of philosophy of technology to contribute to human-computer interaction , 2011, CHI.

[27]  Katie Shilton,et al.  Values Levers , 2013 .

[28]  Colin M. Gray,et al.  "Nothing Comes Before Profit": Asshole Design In the Wild , 2019, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[29]  Roisin McNaney,et al.  Ethical Encounters in Human-Computer Interaction , 2016, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[30]  Mina J. Hanna,et al.  User Data Privacy: Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Privacy Protection , 2018, Computer.

[31]  Colin M. Gray,et al.  Dimensions of UX Practice that Shape Ethical Awareness , 2020, CHI.

[32]  Maximilian Maier.  Dark patterns – An end user perspective , 2019 .

[33]  Mark S. Frankel,et al.  Professional codes: Why, how, and with what impact? , 1989 .

[34]  Christopher Frauenberger,et al.  SIGCHI Research Ethics Town Hall , 2019, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[35]  Shaowen Bardzell,et al.  Humanistic HCI , 2015, Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics.

[36]  Mario Romero,et al.  Situational Ethics: Re-thinking Approaches to Formal Ethics Requirements for Human-Computer Interaction , 2015, CHI.

[37]  Erik Stolterman,et al.  The Nature of Design Practice and Implications for Interaction Design Research , 2008 .

[38]  Colin M. Gray,et al.  Ethical Mediation in UX Practice , 2019, CHI.

[39]  Christopher A. Paul.  Values at play in digital games , 2016, New Media Soc..

[40]  Val Dusek,et al.  Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction , 2006 .

[41]  David G. Hendry,et al.  Value Sensitive Design , 2019 .

[42]  Arieh Waldman.  Cognitive Biases, Dark Patterns, and the 'Privacy Paradox' , 2019, Current opinion in psychology.

[43]  L. Winner.  DO ARTIFACTS HAVE (cid:1) POLITICS? , 2022 .

[44]  Alan Borning,et al.  Next steps for value sensitive design , 2012, CHI.

[45]  Elizabeth Boling,et al.  Inscribing ethics and values in designs for learning: a problematic , 2016 .

[46]  D. Norman.  The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition , 2013 .

[47]  Katie Shilton,et al.  Values and Ethics in Human-Computer Interaction , 2018, Found. Trends Hum. Comput. Interact..

[48]  Lin-Lin Chen.  International Journal of Design: Reaching the first milestone , 2011 .

[49]  J. Jelsma.  Designing ‘moralized’ products , 2006 .

[50]  L. Floridi.  Soft Ethics and the Governance of the Digital , 2018 .

[51]  Joseph Turow,et al.  The corporate cultivation of digital resignation , 2019, New Media Soc..

[52]  A. Panter,et al.  APA handbook of research methods in psychology, Vol 2: Research designs: Quantitative, qualitative, neuropsychological, and biological. , 2012 .

[53]  Dan Lockton,et al.  POSIWID and Determinism in Design for Behaviour Change , 2012 .

[54]  Anthony Dunne,et al.  Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming , 2013 .

[55]  Deirdre K. Mulligan,et al.  Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design Workbooks , 2017, Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact..