title. Moving Towards Trusted Design Patterns
date. April 2022 - October 2022
location. Remote
role. Lead Facilitator, Strategist, and Project Manager at 3x3 Design
Situation:
The Web Foundation’s Tech Policy Design Lab, was tackling the widespread phenomenon of Deceptive Design on the web, also known as "Dark Patterns - referring to design patterns that manipulate people on the web into making choices they otherwise would not make. Even with more recent intiatives to move toward more ethical and trusted design that puts people and their needs first, the cross-sector collaboration that was needed to create systemic changes was lacking. Together with the design consultancy Superbloom, 3x3 worked with the Web Foundation to convene governments, technology companies and civil society actors and co-envision a future web with more ethical and trusted design practices. The goal was to identify key opportunities for such practices to be more widespread and co-create action plans and roadmaps to build towards solutions. To learn more about the context for the project you can read this overview page and this description on the background.
Process and Methods:
Our team engaged a total of 120 global stakeholders through a series of multidisciplinary design workshops. As the lead facilitator, I scoped the sequence of workshops, designed them, facilitated and also led and coordinated a group of global co-facilitators. By guiding workshop participants through dialogue, futuring exercises, systems mapping and brainstorming, we eventually envisioned, sketched and committed to some strategies for change.
To learn more about the workshops and our process, you can read the blog posts here and here.
Outcome:
Strategies for change fit under the two broad areas of 1) creating industry standards and 2) mobilizing diverse changemakers. Creating industry standards meant building new norms of Trusted Design and tools for evaluation and accreditation. Mobilizing diverse changemakers includes interventions such as building a coalition to mobilize change, a crowdsourced reporting tool on Deceptive Design and launching campaigns. To see more about these strategies, you can read the webpage here.
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