Deceptive Patterns
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Understanding “Dark” Design Roles in Computing Education

Author
Colin M. Gray, S. Chivukula, Kassandra Melkey, Rhea Manocha
Date
16 Aug 2021
Publisher
International Computing Education Research Workshop
Focus
Ethics & Responsibility
Category
Academic Scholar

This paper identifies and describes computing students’ negotiation of values as they engage in authentic design problems through a lab protocol study, and identifies a variety of “dark” roles that resulted in manipulation of the user and prioritization of stakeholder needs over user needs.

In conjunction with the increasing ubiquity of technology, computing educators have identified the need for pedagogical engagement with ethical awareness and moral reasoning. Typical approaches to incorporating ethics in computing curricula have focused primarily on abstract methods, principles, or paradigms of ethical reasoning, with relatively little focus on examining and developing students’ pragmatic awareness of ethics as grounded in their everyday work practices. In this paper, we identify and describe computing students’ negotiation of values as they engage in authentic design problems through a lab protocol study. We collected data from four groups of three students each, with each group including participants from either undergraduate User Experience Design students, Industrial Engineering students, or a mix of both.