Course Objectives
Critical View
Develop a critical perspective on interactive systems, questioning the "default" narratives of technology.
Contemporary Challenges
Understand the social, environmental, and ethical challenges arising from modern UX practices.
Methodological Application
Apply rigorous design methods to dissect and address specific user experience problems.
Design Solutions
Explore and propose tangible design solutions (prototypes, provotypes) in response to ethical issues.
Class Schedule
Jan 22
Introduction Lecture
Samuel Huron & Panos Mavros
Feb 18
Guest Lecture 4: Lea Mossesso - Living with obsolete or damaged smartphones
Mar 12
Mar 19
Session 7
Topic to be announced.
Mar 26
Final Project Presentation
Student presentations and critique.
Assignments & Modules
Module 1
Issue Spotting
An exercise in identifying and categorizing deceptive patterns within existing digital interfaces.
Module 2
Provotypes & Prototypes
Designing provocative prototypes to expose or challenge underlying ethical issues in technology.
Module 3
Final Project
Comprehensive design intervention addressing a critical UX challenge, culminating in a final presentation.
Key Concept Glossary
User interface design choices that manipulate users into doing things they might not otherwise do, such as buying insurance or signing up for recurring bills. Often synonymous with "Dark Patterns" but emphasizes the intentionality of deception.
A term coined by Harry Brignull in 2010. It refers to features of interface design crafted to trick users into doing things, like buying a more expensive item or sharing more data than intended.
A social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole. In the context of UX, it involves analyzing the power structures, biases, and societal impacts embedded within technological artifacts and design processes.
Moral challenges arising in digital design, including privacy violations, addiction mechanisms (like infinite scroll), exclusion (accessibility), and the manipulation of user autonomy.
References & Bibliography
- Barab, S. A., Thomas, M. K., Dodge, T., Squire, K., & Newell, M. (2004). Critical design ethnography: Designing for change. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 35(2), 254-268.
- Bardzell, J., & Bardzell, S. (2013, April). What is "critical" about critical design? Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 3297-3306).
- Bardzell, S., Bardzell, J., Forlizzi, J., Zimmerman, J., & Antanitis, J. (2012, June). Critical design and critical theory: the challenge of designing for provocation. Proceedings of the designing interactive systems conference (pp. 288-297).
- Boer, L., & Donovan, J. (2012, June). Provotypes for participatory innovation. Proceedings of the designing interactive systems conference (pp. 388-397).
- Casilli, A. A. (2019). En attendant les robots-Enquête sur le travail du clic. Edition du Seuil.
- Desjardins, A., Tomico, O., Lucero, A., Cecchinato, M. E., & Neustaedter, C. (2021). Introduction to the special issue on first-person methods in HCI. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 28(6), 1-12.
- Gómez Ortega, A., Genç, H. U., van der Maden, W., Comber, R., Lampinen, A., & Balaam, M. (2025, July). Photo BOO-th: Designing Visceral Encounters with Synthetic Intimate Imagery. In Companion Publication of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems.
- Alejandra Gómez Ortega, Nadia Campo Woytuk, Joo Young Park, Anupriya Tuli, Deepika Yadav, Marianela Ciolfi Felice, Madeline Balaam, and Airi Lampinen. 2025. Designing for Secondary Users of Intimate Technologies. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2787–2802. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735420
- Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., & Toombs, A. L. (2018, April). The dark (patterns) side of UX design. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-14).
- Gray, C. M., Santos, C., Bielova, N., Toth, M., & Clifford, D. (2021, May). Dark patterns and the legal requirements of consent banners: An interaction criticism perspective. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-18).
- Greenberg, S., Carpendale, S., Marquardt, N., & Buxton, B. (2012). Sketching user experiences: The workbook. Elsevier.
- Mackay, W. E. (1988, April). Video Prototyping: a technique for developing hypermedia systems. CHI’88 Conference Companion Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vol. 5, pp. 1-3).
- Mah, K., Loke, L., & Hespanhol, L. (2021). Towards a contemplative research framework for training self-observation in HCI: A study of compassion cultivation. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 28(6), 1-27.
- Millen, D. R. (2000, August). Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research. Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques (pp. 280-286).
- Winner, L. (2017). Do artifacts have politics? . In Computer ethics (pp. 177-192). Routledge.
- Nicolas Nova (2022), Exercices d'observation: Dans les pas des anthropologues, des écrivains, des designers et des naturalistes du quotidien. Premier Parallèle. (n.d.).