The workshop organizers have researched dark patterns across a range of different domains and have contributed to building a research community that increasingly includes members of the regulatory, legal, and design communities. We have a track record of running successful workshops (e.g., EduCHI at CHI 2023, the “Dark Side” of Multi-Modal Social Agents at CUI 2023, “What Can CHI Do About Dark Patterns?” at CHI 2021) and are well-connected with the growing international research community supporting dark patterns research and engagement efforts. The organizing team includes mid-career and early-career scholars alongside doctoral researchers who have actively contributed to dark patterns scholarship.
Contact organizers: Colin Gray (comgray@iu.edu).
Colin M. Gray (Lead Facilitator) is an Associate Professor at Indiana University, where they serve as program director for a graduate program in HCI/d. Their research has contributed foundational knowledge on dark patterns, including a unified ontology; connections between design, law, and HCI; and articulation of challenges in supporting ethical design practices.
Links: Personal Page, Google Scholar
René Schäfer (Co-Facilitator) is a PhD candidate at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany. His research focuses on mental models, legislation, and technical countermeasures to help people deal with malicious and deceptive designs. His most recent work investigated visual countermeasures against dark patterns.
Links: University Page, Google Scholar
Johanna Gunawan (Co-Facilitator) is a PhD candidate at Northeastern University. Her interdisciplinary work spans cybersecurity, HCI, and law, with a current focus on understanding dark patterns in emerging technologies and policy considerations for improving consumer protections against dark patterns and similar designs.
Links: Personal Page, Google Scholar
Nataliia Bielova (Papers Chair) is a Tenured Research Scientist at the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, Inria, since 2013. Nataliia worked for the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) in 2021-2022. Her transdisciplinary research focuses on building knowledge on dark patterns, such as work on a unified ontology and connections between design, law, and HCI. She works on legal and technical analysis of dark patterns in consent banners and on the impact of consent design on the outcome of users’ consent decisions.
Links: Personal Page, Google Scholar
Lorena Sánchez (Paper Chair) is a PhD candidate at the University of Luxembourg. Her research focuses on the intersection of manipulative designs and vulnerable populations and how we can design to protect users and increase their resilience. She aims to create multidisciplinary solutions to tackle vulnerability towards manipulative designs with a social perspective.
Links: Google Scholar
Katie Seaborn (Online Coordinator) is an Associate Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. A key research theme in their lab is Interactions in the Negaverse, a critical trajectory of scholarship that explores how technology exploits, affords, or even celebrates negative experiences. Their team discovered known and novel dark patterns in Japanese apps. Read her position statement on CHI ’24 in Hawai’i.
Links: Lab Page, Google Scholar
Thomas Mildner (Publication Chair and Online Coordinator) is a PhD candidate at the University of Bremen, Germany. With a specific focus on dark patterns in social media, Thomas’ research concerns (un-)ethical design in digital interfaces. His work considers methods to analyse dark patterns and the development of countermeasures to support autonomous decision-making.
Links: Personal Page, Google Scholar
Hauke Sandhaus (Communications Chair) is a PhD student at Cornell University where he is studying the design of ethical technology by incorporating policy-making in the process. He is currently collecting examples of industries’ use of bright patterns.
Links: Personal Page, Google Scholar
This work is funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF Grant No. 1909714), Klaus Tschira Stiftung gGmbH (the non-profit Klaus Tschira Foundation), and the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR, grant no. IS/14717072 Deceptive Patterns Online (Decepticon)).