Last week I had the privilege of joining a few dozen dark patterns scholars across a wide variety of disciplines at the Lorentz Center at Leiden University in the Netherlands for the Fair Patterns for Online Interfaces Workshop. And what a wonderful opportunity it was – this was my first time attending such a program, in which scholars from all over the world are given a full week to sit, think, and discuss ideas towards future research. (As Jaap-Henk Hoepman says in his write-up of the experience, the Lorentz Center provides you with ample support to hold your own workshop if you so choose!)

Conference-attached workshops are much shorter and more hectic, and thus it felt like a luxury to let ideas simmer for hours and simply have the time to process the day’s discussions.

Meta-Takeaways

Before (attempting) to get into the meat of the content covered last week, I want to stress that time – and physical proximity – is such a valuable resource in my research area, at least. I’m sure it’s just as important in other fields, but it was absolutely a treat to have a collection of diverse disciplines together in one room.

Attendees spanned traditional CS, cybersecurity, HCI, design, academia, practice, law, economics, industry, consulting… the list goes on. This diversity plus the freedom to speak and ideate without each discipline’s differing incentives in immediate mind (particularly publication, profit, etc) let us disagree safely and constructively, leverage human creativity to imagine better digital designs, and otherwise challenge each other.