The panel at CPDP 2022 on “Privacy design, dark patterns, and speculative data futures” brings together researchers, regulators, and designers to talk about how current interfaces manipulate people, and how speculative design and foresight could help us imagine and build better data futures. This panel was moderated by Cristiana Santos (University of Utrecht, Netherlands) and had speakers like Régis Chatellier, Stefano Leucci, Dusan Pavlovic, Arianna Rossi and Cennydd Bowles.
The core things discussed on this panel is very close to my thesis: on one side, dark patterns and privacy-invasive mechanisms quietly exploit users; on the other side, there is a growing push for transparency-enhancing technologies and privacy-by-design approaches that could give people more control over their digital footprints.
One of the clear threads in the discussion is that dark patterns are not accidents; they result from deliberate choices, business pressures, and a lack of ethical guardrails in the design process. Panelists talk about building description schemas and datasets to systematically identify and classify deceptive patterns in interfaces, especially around privacy choices and access to personal data. For my thesis, this reinforces the idea that “ethical design” cannot stay abstract. If I want to help people manage their digital footprints, I need to treat dark patterns and their opposites as concrete, nameable design patterns and counter-patterns that can be recognised, tested, and avoided.
Another important topic is how law, design, and foresight can work together. Several speakers stress that legal tools and enforcement alone are too slow and reactive to address fast-moving interface manipulation. They argue that designers and product managers hold a lot of power over whether an interface is deceptive or respectful, and that speculative methods can be used to anticipate future harms and design for better outcomes before those harms become normal. This fits directly with my research interest in “effective” ethical design: effectiveness here means not just compliance, but the ability of interfaces to prevent foreseeable harm to users’ data and autonomy.
Speculative design appears in the panel as a practical method, not just an art-school exercise. One example the discussion connects to is the use of speculative enactments and design fiction to help designers explore tensions between business goals and privacy rights. By staging hypothetical interfaces and futures, designers can see how certain patterns might feel manipulative or disloyal before they are deployed at scale. For my thesis, this suggests a concrete technique: using speculative prototypes to make digital footprints and their consequences visible, then inviting users or stakeholders to react to these “what if” scenarios.
The panel also raises a warning: speculative design can become trendy and superficial if it is done without a clear purpose or connection to actual decision-making. For ethical design, this means that speculative scenarios should feed into real processes like data protection impact assessments, design reviews, or pattern libraries, instead of staying as cool concept visuals. This is a useful constraint for my own work: any speculative interface I use in my thesis should be clearly tied to decisions about what data is collected, how consent is handled, and how users see and control their footprints.
For my research, this impulse does three things. First, it nudges me to explicitly frame dark patterns as “disloyal” design choices that work against users’ interests, especially in how their data is captured and used. Second, it shows that privacy-by-design and speculative design can be combined: speculative futures can help define the guardrails and desirable directions for ethical interaction patterns around digital footprints. Third, it highlights that designers and product teams must be at the center of this work, not just lawyers and regulators, which strengthens my argument that interaction design is a key lever for meaningful digital autonomy.
Some accompanying links:
Here is a link to the full panel video, which serves as the core resource for this impulse and gives the complete discussion on privacy design, dark patterns, and data futures:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbP_SjtGdkk
This conference program entry and description provide context on how the panel fits into a broader event on privacy and data protection, including its goals and questions around law, design, and foresight:
https://researchportal.vub.be/files/97144098/2022.05.22_CPDP2022.pdf
Finally, this related article on “Rationalizing Dark Patterns” explores how designers themselves rationalize or reproduce dark patterns in privacy UX, and proposes speculative enactments as a tool for more critical, privacy-aware design practice, which aligns well with the panel’s themes and my thesis:
http://www.ijdesign.org/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/4117/972
Disclaimer: This blog post was developed with AI assistance (Perplexity) to help with structuring and phrasing my reflections.