arXiv subjects

Colin M. Gray

Publications and source records attributed to Colin M. Gray.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Design Knowledge in Data Visualization: Mapping the Epistemic Landscape

Data visualization research has developed many influential forms of design knowledge, including perceptual principles, design guidelines, process models, and formalized representations of design constraints. These contributions have been effective at articulating explicit, portable, and codified forms of knowledge. Yet the broader landscape on which visualization design depends remains less clearly articulated, especially with respect to intermediate-level knowledge, precedents, tacit repertoires, and situated forms of knowing. In this paper, we draw on design theory to map this broader landscape of design knowledge in data visualization. Through this lens, we show how visualization research has built substantial strengths in some regions while leaving others comparatively underarticulated. We further argue that visualization design depends not only on knowledge artifacts such as theories, guidelines, and patterns, but also on knowledge-in-use---the situated interpretation, adaptation, and coordination of multiple forms of knowing in concrete design situations. This broader account has implications for how the field conceptualizes design expertise, evaluates and develops scholarly contributions, and approaches AI-assisted design. Rather than treating visualization design as either fully formalizable or wholly resistant to computational support, we argue for a differentiated view in which computational systems can support some forms of design knowing, while others remain inseparable from human judgment, contextual interpretation, and the ongoing reorganization of design work in practice.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Getting Trapped in Amazon's "Iliad Flow": A Foundation for the Temporal Analysis of Dark Patterns

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 analysis of static images or as isolated pattern types. In this paper, we present a case study of Amazon Prime's "Iliad Flow" to illustrate the interplay of dark patterns across a user journey, grounded in insights from a US Federal Trade Commission complaint against the company. We use this case study to lay the groundwork for a methodology of Temporal Analysis of Dark Patterns (TADP), including considerations for characterization of individual dark patterns across a user journey, combinatorial effects of multiple dark patterns types, and implications for expert detection and automated detection.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Anti-Heroes: An Ethics-focused Method for Responsible Designer Intentions

HCI and design researchers have designed, adopted, and customized a range of ethics-focused methods to inscribe values and support ethical decision making in a design process. In this work-in-progress, we add to this body of resources, constructing a method that surfaces the designer's intentions in an action-focused way, encouraging consideration of both manipulative and value-centered roles. Anti-Heroes is a card deck that allows a designer to playfully take on pairs of manipulative (Anti-Hero) and value-centered (Hero) roles during design ideation/conceptualization, evaluation, and ethical dialogue. The card deck includes twelve cards with Anti-Hero and Hero faces, along with three action cards that include reflective questions for different play modes. Alongside the creation of the Anti-Hero card deck, we describe the evaluation and iteration of the card deck through playtesting sessions with four groups of three design students. We propose implications of Anti-Heros for technology and design education and practice.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Using Schema to Inform Method Design Practices

There are many different forms of design knowledge that guide and shape a designer's ability to act and realize potential realities. Methods and schemas are examples of design knowledge commonly used by design researchers and designers alike. In this pictorial, we explore, engage, and describe the role of schemas as tools that can support design researchers in formulating methods to support design action, with our framing of method design specifically focused on ethical design complexity. We present four ways for method designers to engage with schema: 1) Systems to operationalize complex design constructs such as ethical design complexity through an A.E.I.O.YOU schema; 2) Classifiers to map existing methods and identify the possibility for new methods through descriptive semantic differentials; 3) Tools that enable the creation of methods that relate to one or more elements of the schema through creative departures from research to design; and 4) Interactive channels to playfully engage potential and new opportunities through schema interactivity.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

An Ontology of Dark Patterns Knowledge: Foundations, Definitions, and a Pathway for Shared Knowledge-Building

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. However, a lack of universally accepted definitions across the academic, legislative and regulatory space has likely limited the impact that scholarship on dark patterns might have in supporting sanctions and evolved design practices. In this paper, we seek to support the development of a shared language of dark patterns, harmonizing ten existing regulatory and academic taxonomies of dark patterns and proposing a three-level ontology with standardized definitions for 65 synthesized dark patterns types across low-, meso-, and high-level patterns. We illustrate how this ontology can support translational research and regulatory action, including pathways to extend our initial types through new empirical work and map across application domains.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Languaging Ethics in Technology Practice

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 reflect upon their everyday work. We engaged twelve practitioners in individual co-creation workshops, encouraging them to reflect on their ethical role in their everyday work through a series of generative and evaluative activities. We analyzed these data to identify how each practitioner reasoned about ethics through language and artifacts, finding that practitioners used a range of rhetorical tropes to describe their ethical commitments and beliefs in ways that were complex and sometimes contradictory. Across three cases, we describe how ethics was negotiated through language across three key zones of ecological emergence: the practitioner's "core" beliefs about ethics, internal and external ecological elements that shaped or mediated these core beliefs, and the ultimate boundaries they reported refusing to cross. Building on these findings, we describe how the languaging of ethics reveals opportunities to definitionally and practically engage with ethics in technology ethics research, practice, and education.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

Practitioner Trajectories of Engagement with Ethics-Focused Method Creation

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-focused action plan. Using a qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis approach, we identified a range of roles and process moves that practitioners employed and illustrate the interplay of these elements of practitioners' instrumental judgment through a series of three cases, which includes evolution of the action plan itself, the ethical dilemmas or areas of support the action plan was intended to support, and how the action plan represents resonance for the practitioner that created it. We conclude with implications for supporting ethics in socio-technical practice and opportunities for the further development of ethics-focused methods that are resonant with the realities of practice.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Scaffolding Ethics-Focused Methods for Practice Resonance

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 propose a set of empirically-supported "intentions" to frame practitioners' selection of relevant ethics-focused methods based on interviews with practitioners from a range of technology and design professions, and then leverage these intentions in the design and iterative evaluation of a website that allows practitioners to identify supports for ethics-focused action in their work context. Building on these findings, we propose a set of heuristics to evaluate the practice resonance of resources to support ethics-focused practice, laying the groundwork for increased ecological resonance of ethics-focused methods and method selection tools.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Surveying the Landscape of Ethics-Focused Design Methods

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 "methods," which we define as any supports for everyday work practices of designers. In this paper, we identify, analyze, and map a collection of 63 existing ethics-focused methods intentionally designed for ethical impact. We present a content analysis, providing a descriptive record of how they operationalize ethics, their intended audience or context of use, their "core" or "script," and the means by which these methods are formulated, articulated, and languaged. Building on these results, we provide an initial definition of ethics-focused methods, identifying potential opportunities for the development of future methods to support design practice and research.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Let's Talk About Socio-Technical Angst: Tracing the History and Evolution of Dark Patterns on Twitter from 2010-2021

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 scholars and regulators. The increased interest in the term and underpinnings of dark patterns across a range of sociotechnical practitioners intrigued us to study the evolution of the concept, to potentially speculate the future trajectory of conversations around dark patterns. In this paper, we examine the history and evolution of the Twitter discourse through #darkpatterns from its inception in June 2010 until April 2021, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to describe how this discourse has changed over time. We frame the evolution of this discourse as an emergent transdisciplinary conversation that connects multiple disciplinary perspectives through the shared concept of dark patterns, whereby these participants engage in a conversation marked by socio-technical angst in order to identify and fight back against deceptive design practices. We discuss the potential future trajectories of this discourse and opportunities for further scholarship at the intersection of design, policy, and activism.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2021

Dark Patterns and the Legal Requirements of Consent Banners: An Interaction Criticism Perspective

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, including tensions and opportunities that transcend disciplinary boundaries. In this paper, we draw together perspectives and commentary from HCI, design, privacy and data protection, and legal research communities, using the language and strategies of "dark patterns" to perform an interaction criticism reading of three different types of consent banners. Our analysis builds upon designer, interface, user, and social context lenses to raise tensions and synergies that arise together in complex, contingent, and conflicting ways in the act of designing consent banners. We conclude with opportunities for transdisciplinary dialogue across legal, ethical, computer science, and interactive systems scholarship to translate matters of ethical concern into public policy.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

End User Accounts of Dark Patterns as Felt Manipulation

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"---forms of manipulation that prey on human psychology---to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others in ways that present unequal value to the end user. In this paper, we provide an account of end user perceptions of manipulation that builds on and extends notions of dark patterns. We report on the results of a survey of users conducted in English and Mandarin Chinese (n=169), including follow-up interviews from nine survey respondents. We used a card sorting method to support thematic analysis of responses from each cultural context, identifying both qualitatively-supported insights to describe end users' felt experiences of manipulative products, and a continuum of manipulation. We further support this analysis through a quantitative analysis of survey results and the presentation of vignettes from the interviews. We conclude with implications for future research, considerations for public policy, and guidance on how to further empower and give users autonomy in their experiences with digital services.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Design Judgment in Data Visualization Practice

Data visualization is becoming an increasingly popular field of design practice. Although many studies have highlighted the knowledge required for effective data visualization design, their focus has largely been on formal knowledge and logical decision-making processes that can be abstracted and codified. Less attention has been paid to the more situated and personal ways of knowing that are prevalent in all design activity. In this study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with data visualization practitioners during which they were asked to describe the practical and situated aspects of their design processes. Using a philosophical framework of design judgment from Nelson and Stolterman [23], we analyzed the transcripts to describe the volume and complex layering of design judgments that are used by data visualization practitioners as they describe and interrogate their work. We identify aspects of data visualization practice that require further investigation beyond notions of rational, model- or principle-directed decision-making processes.

cs.HC↗