Promoting Bright Patterns

User experience designers are facing increasing scrutiny and criticism for creating harmful technologies, leading to a pushback against unethical design practices. While clear-cut harmful practices such as dark patterns have received attention, trends towards automation, personalization, and recommendation present more ambiguous ethical challenges. To address potential harm in these "gray" instances, we propose the concept of "bright patterns" - persuasive design solutions that prioritize user goals and well-being over their desires and business objectives. The ambition of this paper is threefold: to define the term "bright patterns", to provide examples of such patterns, and to advocate for the adoption of bright patterns through policymaking.Comment: For associated website, see https://brightpatterns.org/. Published to the CHI '23 Workshop: Designing Technology and Policy Simultaneousl

Towards Prototyping Driverless Vehicle Behaviors, City Design, and Policies Simultaneously

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) can potentially improve urban living by reducing accidents, increasing transportation accessibility and equity, and decreasing emissions. Realizing these promises requires the innovations of AV driving behaviors, city plans and infrastructure, and traffic and transportation policies to join forces. However, the complex interdependencies among AV, city, and policy design issues can hinder their innovation. We argue the path towards better AV cities is not a process of matching city designs and policies with AVs' technological innovations, but a process of iterative prototyping of all three simultaneously: Innovations can happen step-wise as the knot of AV, city, and policy design loosens and tightens, unwinds and reties. In this paper, we ask: How can innovators innovate AVs, city environments, and policies simultaneously and productively toward better AV cities? The paper has two parts. First, we map out the interconnections among the many AV, city, and policy design decisions, based on a literature review spanning HCI/HRI, transportation science, urban studies, law and policy, operations research, economy, and philosophy. This map can help innovators identify design constraints and opportunities across the traditional AV/city/policy design disciplinary bounds. Second, we review the respective methods for AV, city, and policy design, and identify key barriers in combining them: (1) Organizational barriers to AV-city-policy design collaboration, (2) computational barriers to multi-granularity AV-city-policy simulation, and (3) different assumptions and goals in joint AV-city-policy optimization. We discuss two broad approaches that can potentially address these challenges, namely, "low-fidelity integrative City-AV-Policy Simulation (iCAPS)" and "participatory design optimization".Comment: Published to the CHI '23 Workshop: Designing Technology and Policy Simultaneousl

VR Job Interview Using a Gender-Swapped Avatar

Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a potential solution for mitigating bias in a job interview by hiding the applicants' demographic features. The current study examines the use of a gender-swapped avatar in a virtual job interview that affects the applicants' perceptions and their performance evaluated by recruiters. With a mixed-method approach, we first conducted a lab experiment (N=8) exploring how using a gender-swapped avatar in a virtual job interview impacts perceived anxiety, confidence, competence, and ability to perform. Then, a semi-structured interview investigated the participants' VR interview experiences using an avatar. Our findings suggest that using gender-swapped avatars may reduce the anxiety that job applicants will experience during the interview. Also, the affinity diagram produced seven key themes highlighting the advantages and limitations of VR as an interview platform. These findings contribute to the emerging field of VR-based recruitment and have practical implications for promoting diversity and inclusion in the hiring process.Comment: CSCW 2022 Poster