Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn’t mean to. The purpose of this site is to spread awareness and to shame companies that use them.
Reading about Value Sensitive Design I came across a link to Harry Brignul’s Dark Patterns. The site is about ways that web designers try to manipulate users. They have a Hall of Shame that is instructive and a Reading List if you want to follow up. It is interesting to see attempts to regulate certain patterns of deception.
Values are expressed and embedded in technology; they have real and often non-obvious impacts on users and society.
The alternative is introduce values and ethics into the design process. This is where Value Sensitive Design comes. As developed by Batya Friedman and colleagues it is an approach that includes methods for thinking-through the ethics of a project from the beginning. Some of the approaches mentioned in the article include:
- Mapping out what a design will support, hinder or prevent.
- Consider the stakeholders, especially those that may not have any say in the deployment or use of a technology.
- Try to understand the underlying assumptions of technologies.
- Broaden our gaze as to the effects of a technology on human experience.
They have even produced a set of Envisioning Cards for sale.