Colin M. Gray

Indiana University Bloomington | IUB · School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering

Deceptive design practices are increasingly used by companies to extract profit, harvest data, and limit consumer choice. Dark patterns represent the most common contemporary amalgamation of these problematic practices, connecting designers, technologists, scholars, regulators, and legal professionals in transdisciplinary dialogue. However, a lack...

Cultivate a socially responsible design process with Universal Methods of Ethical Design, the first comprehensive survey of ethically centered design practices. Are you eager to make a positive social impact through your designs? Join the growing number of practitioners and third-sector organizations who are using ethics-focused design methods to...

Over the past decade, HCI researchers and practitioners have increasingly addressed ethics-focused issues through a range of theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic contributions to the field. While many forms of design knowledge have been proposed and described, we focus explicitly on knowledge that has been codified as “methods,” which we defi...

New regulations and legal frameworks are rapidly reshaping the technology landscape, and it is unclear how regulations might impact technology design practices. UX design as a discipline has previously been defined by its complexity and volatility, utilizing multiple forms of knowledge that are often in tension or conflict. In this work-in-progress...

Ethics is complex and situated, involving many stakeholders that impact the design of technology systems. Numerous methods and tools have been proposed to enable practitioners to address ethical issues in the workplace. However, little work has described how designers themselves understand and seek to respond to that ethical complexity. In this sho...

Design researchers have previously sought to describe, model, and represent the cognitive processes of designers. In parallel, researchers in HCI and STS have identified a range of frameworks to describe the ethical and value-related char-acter of design activity. We have identified a productive gap between these two sets of literature—namely, the...

This workshop proposal advocates for a dynamic, community-led approach to ethics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) by integrating principles from feminist HCI and digital civics. Traditional ethics in HCI often overlook interpersonal considerations, resulting in static frameworks ill-equipped to address dynamic social contexts and power dynamics....

As an inter-discipline or trans-discipline, HCI includes or references many different sources of knowledge in which students are expected to be conversant. The education of HCI practitioners requires exposure to an increasingly large number of these perspectives. However, how should this exposure be structured, with what level of depth, and through...

Metacognition is vital for learning in general, and its value for HCI educational practices warrants investigation. In general, metacognitive awareness can help student designers consider how their thought processes might influence their design outputs. More specifically , it may also have relevance for helping HCI students develop intercultural co...

The EU ePrivacy Directive requires consent before using cookies or other tracking technologies, while the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) sets high-level and principle-based requirements for such consent to be valid. However, the translation of such requirements into concrete design interfaces for consent banners is far from straight...

Design and technology practitioners are increasingly aware of the ethical impact of their work practices, desiring tools to support their ethical awareness across a range of contexts. In this paper, we report on findings from a series of six co-creation workshops with 26 technology and design practitioners that supported their creation of a bespoke...

Deceptive and coercive design practices are increasingly used by companies to extract profit, harvest data, and limit consumer choice. Dark patterns represent the most common contemporary amalgamation of these problematic practices, connecting designers, technologists , scholars, regulators, and legal professionals in transdisci-plinary dialogue. H...

Ethics as embodied by technology practitioners resists simple definition—particularly as it relates to the interplay of identity, organizational, and professional complexity. In this paper we use the linguistic notion of languaging as an analytic lens to describe how technology and design practitioners negotiate their conception of ethics as they r...

Design students must develop competence in a wide range of areas in order to be successful in their future practice. Increasingly, knowledge of design methods is used to frame both a designer’s repertoire and their overall facility as a designer. However, there is little research on how students build cognitive schema in relation to design methods...

Designers are increasingly interested in using methodologies that foreground the politics of design, moving beyond product-centered notions of work that are common even within human-centered design traditions. In this paper, we document the experiences of undergraduate UX design students as they used a digital civics approach to support local commu...

Instructional design has been dominated by a philosophy focused on efficiency, effectiveness, and appeal. Learning Experience Design (LXD), emerging recently, offers a different set of values with the potential to enhance and evolve the practice of design for teaching and learning. Using the concepts of knowledge and philosophy from the literature...

Dark patterns are ubiquitous in digital systems, impacting users throughout their journeys on many popular apps and websites. While substantial efforts from the research community in the last five years have led to consolidated taxonomies of dark patterns, including an emerging ontology, most applications of these descriptors have been focused on a...

Deceptive and coercive design practices are increasingly used by companies to extract profit, harvest data, and limit consumer choice. Dark patterns represent the most common contemporary amalgamation of these problematic practices, connecting designers, technologists, scholars, regulators, and legal professionals in transdisciplinary dialogue. How...

Maintaining students' privacy in higher education, an integral aspect of learning design and technology integration, is not only a matter of policy and law but also a matter of design ethics. Similar to faculty educators, learning designers in higher education play a vital role in maintaining students' privacy by designing learning experiences that...

Dark patterns are increasingly ubiquitous in digital services and regulation, describing instances where designers use deceptive, manipulative, or coercive tactics to encourage end users to make decisions that are not in their best interest. Research regarding dark patterns has also increased significantly over the past several years. In this syste...

Ethical engagement is central to the practice of design, impacting stakeholders across and beyond technology organizations as well as producing downstream social and environmental impacts. Scholars have previously described the ecologically-mediated nature of ethics in practice as a manifestation of "ethical design complexity;" however, the means o...

Numerous methods and tools have been proposed to motivate or support ethical awareness in design practice. However, many existing resources are not easily discoverable by practitioners, and are often framed using language that is not accessible or resonant with everyday practice. In this paper, we present three complementary strands of work with th...

Knowledge of design methods is critical for careers in User Experience (UX) design and other felds commonly served by HCI programs. In this masterclass, we will seek to bring together the knowledge contained in key texts commonly used in HCI education and the evident pedagogical challenges that underlie codifed methods knowledge. Such fundamental q...

Making framing judgments is at the heart of design. When faced with complex, open-ended situations, designers need to exercise good judgment to identify the core of the problem at hand and set the boundaries of the conceptual space through which the design process will unfold. While framing ability is broadly recognized as important, the factors th...

Ethics as embodied by technology practitioners resists simple definition, particularly as it relates to the interplay of identity, organizational, and professional complexity. In this paper we use the linguistic notion of languaging as an analytic lens to describe how technology and design practitioners negotiate their conception of ethics as they...

EduCHI 2023 will bring together an international community of scholars, practitioners, and researchers to shape the future of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education. Held as part of the CHI 2023 conference, the one-day symposium will feature interactive discussions about HCI educational research, pedagogical innovations, teaching practices, and...

Technology ethics is increasingly at the forefront of human-computer interaction scholarship, with increasing visibility not only to end users of technology, but also regulators, technology practitioners, and platforms. The notion of "dark patterns" has emerged as one common framing of technology manipulation, describing instances where psychologic...

Growth hacking, particularly within the spectre of surveillance capitalism , has led to the widespread use of deceptive, manipulative, and coercive design techniques in the last decade. These challenges exist at the intersection of many diferent technology professions that are rapidly evolving and "shapeshifting" their design practices to confront...

In this design case, we describe our design process that resulted in recommendations for a four-year undergraduate curriculum in transdisciplinary studies. The case is centered on a fast-paced, two-week design "sprint" undertaken by the two authors, which involved consolidating and synthesizing program evaluation data and course designs from the th...

Prototyping is a core element of engineering and technology activity, giving form to design concepts and facilitating iteration and testing. With the rise of the ''maker movement,'' higher fidelity forms of prototyping have often been privileged, without deep investigation into prototyping activities that support materially-focused exploration acro...

User Experience (UX) design has expanded rapidly across a range of industry and educational contexts in the last decade. While the core knowledge and “centre” of UX is still emergent and contested, new educational programs to train the next generation of UX designers have begun to outline pedagogical practices and concepts that have relevance to th...

Co-design practices have been used for decades to support participatory engagement in design work. However, despite a wide range of materials that describe the design and commitments of numerous co-design experiences, few descriptions of the knowledge that guides designers when creating these experiences exist. Thus, we ask: What kind of knowledge...

Numerous methods and tools have been proposed to motivate or support ethical awareness in design practice. However, many existing resources are not easily discoverable by practitioners. One reason being that they are framed using language that is not immediately accessible or resonant with the felt complexity of everyday practice. In this paper, we...

Design and technology practitioners are increasingly aware of the ethical impact of their work practices, desiring tools to support their ethical awareness across a range of contexts. In this paper, we report on findings from a series of co-design workshops with technology and design practitioners that supported their creation of a bespoke ethics-f...

Designers' use of deceptive and manipulative design practices have become increasingly ubiquitous, impacting users' ability to make choices that respect their agency and autonomy. These practices have been popularly defined through the term "dark patterns" which has gained attention from designers, privacy scholars, and more recently, even legal sc...

Online services have become increasingly centralized, drawing on notions of the ‘platform economy’ to focus on ecosystem value rather than user value. In parallel, there have been efforts by developers to augment these platforms, empowering platform users in the process. We explored a 12-month participatory-action project, focusing on redesigning p...

What makes the design of futures sufficiently transformative? Worldwide, people are aware of the need to change and keep changing to address eco-social challenges and their fallout in an age of crises and transitions in climate, biodiversity, and health. Calls for climate justice and the development of eco-social sensibilities speak to the need for...

HCI and UX work is increasingly global, and students have the potential to benefit from building their globalization competence. However, little research has described the unique opportunities and challenges of intercultural project work in the context of HCI education, including the ways in which design knowledge is leveraged in a cross-cultural s...

Feedback and assessment are core features of modern educational experiences. Despite having different aims, they are often conflated and can even conflict in cases where grades inhibit the goals of feedback. In this 'teachable moment' paper we describe strategies employed in a series of UX design courses to separate grading and feedback, attempting...

Design students must develop competence in a wide range of areas in order to be successful in their future practice. Increasingly, knowledge of design methods is used to frame both a designer's repertoire and their overall facility as a designer. However, there is little research on how students build cognitive schema in relation to design methods...

In this discussion paper, we present an approach to HCI pedagogy that leverages vertical integration within a studio-focused UX design program spanning the undergraduate and graduate levels. We provide a brief introduction to the program we have developed at Purdue University, present our vertical integration strategy, and discuss plans for future...

Studio learning is central to the teaching of design. However, the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside emerging and historic critiques of studio pedagogy , creates a space for critical engagement with the present and potential futures of design education in studio. In this paper, I outline historic critiques of studio pedagogy, drawing p...

Numerous methods have been designed to aid practitioners in identifying ethical concerns, imagining potential futures, defining values, and evaluating existing systems. However, there is little scholarship that addresses the design of these methods, including how ethical concerns are operationalized in these methods. In this paper, we report result...

Discussions around the unethical use of emerging technology have become increasingly common in our society. Despite previous research acknowledging the importance of including societal-level discussions in engineering and technology undergraduate curricula, there is a lack of research around college students’ understanding of and engagement with th...

Design methods have been integral to design studies research, with initial goals of bringing rationality and objectivity to design activities, later shifting to the creation and provision of methods as tools to encourage more reflective, meaningful, and socially responsible design practices. However, little research exists that describes how method...

Designers are increasingly interested in using methodologies that foreground the politics of design, moving beyond product-centered notions of work that are common even within human-centered design traditions. In this paper, we document the experiences of undergraduate UX design students as they used a digital civics approach to support local commu...

Today’s user experience (UX) educators and designers can no longer just focus on creating more usable systems, but must also rise to the level of strategists, using design thinking and human–computer interaction (HCI) solutions to improve academic and business outcomes. Both psychological, designer, and engineering approaches are adopted in this st...

Studio pedagogy has been used as a comprehensive approach to prepare students to practice within their chosen discipline of design. However, little is known about how students experience these learning environments, including the interplay of social and educational experiences that support the development of expertise and identity. To explore and e...

Manipulation defines many of our experiences as a consumer, including subtle nudges and overt advertising campaigns that seek to gain our attention and money. With the advent of digital services that can continuously optimize online experiences to favor stakeholder requirements, increasingly designers and developers make use of "dark patterns"-form...

Online creative communities are increasingly a space for marginalized groups to build solidarity and engage in activist work, encouraging the exploration and articulation of intersectionally-marginalized identities through processes of creative production. One such context for creative production includes community-driven sites such as Archive of O...

The recent emergence of new undergraduate and graduate design programs with a focus specific to User Experience (UX) offers new opportunities to engage with the complexity of these educational practices. In this paper, we report on a series of ten interviews with students and faculty to describe cross-cultural connections between two UX-focused pro...

Our undergraduate UX program at Purdue University launched in 2016 as one of the first UX-focused undergraduate degree programs in the United States, intentionally designed to support the unique characteristics of a residential, research-intensive, land-grant institution. We designed multiple overlapping studio experiences that formed multiple conn...

Studio education focuses on active learning and assessment that is embedded in students' exploration of ill-structured problems. Critique is a central component of this experience, providing a means of sensemaking, assessment, and socialization. These critique sessions encompass multiple types of interactions among students and instructors at multi...

In conjunction with the increasing ubiquity of technology, computing educators have identifed 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 lit...

User engagement with data privacy and security through consent banners has become a ubiquitous part of interacting with internet services. While previous work has addressed consent banners from either interaction design, legal, and ethics-focused perspectives , little research addresses the connections among multiple disciplinary approaches, includ...

HCI and STS researchers have previously described the ethical complexity of practice, drawing together aspects of organizational complexity, design knowledge, and ethical frameworks. Building on this work, we investigate the identity claims and beliefs that impact practitioners' ability to recognize and act upon ethical concerns in a range of techn...

Scholars have previously described how online communities engage in particular discourses and forms of argumentation. In parallel, HCI and STS researchers have described discourses surrounding ethics and values and their role in shaping design processes and outcomes. However, little work has addressed the intersection of ethical concern and the dis...

Over the past decade, HCI researchers, design researchers, and practitioners have increasingly addressed ethics-focused issues through a range of theoretical, methodological and pragmatic contributions to the field. While many forms of design knowledge have been proposed and described, we focus explicitly on knowledge that has been codified as "met...

An exploration of values and perspectives embodied in designed artifacts was conducted via the analysis of two artifacts: Mathemagics-Mental Math Tricks™ and Photomath™. Two frameworks were used for the analysis, first principles of instruction and interaction criticism, in order to identify points at which similar and different value positions and...

Historical Instructional Design Cases presents a collection of design cases which are historical precedents for the field with utility for practicing designers and implications for contemporary design and delivery. Featuring concrete and detailed views of instructional design materials, programs, and environments, this book’s unique curatorial appr...

Manipulation defines many of our experiences as a consumer, including subtle nudges and overt advertising campaigns that seek to gain our attention and money. With the advent of digital services that can continuously optimize online experiences to favor stakeholder requirements, increasingly designers and developers make use of "dark patterns"---fo...

In this chapter, I contextualize the knowledge production of the human-computer interaction (HCI) community within broader epistemological, historical, and disciplinary framings of this scholarship. I describe the historical landscape of HCI as a discipline, including the significant subcommunities that have formed over time as the discipline has b...