Towards Trusted Design - Takeaways from workshops on “Prototyping theFuture”
Trusted Design, as defined by the Web Foundation, puts people and their needs ahead of the platformand gives the user control over their online choices. In the first workshop of a series on Trusted Design,
held by the Tech Policy Design Lab and global design partners 3x3 and Simply Secure, participants
collectively imagined that the experience of Trusted Design would utilise ongoing consent (“no meansno”) and leave web users satisfied with their choices and in control of the decisions they make online (aswell as their data.) Participants brainstormed opportunities and ideas for advancing the application ofTrusted Design.
The most recent round of workshops were held on three different dates (July 19, 21, and 26) and times toaccommodate three time zones. We gathered participants representing different regions of the world(North America: 33%; Europe: 29%; Asia: 10.5%; South America: 10.5%; Africa: 8%; Australia: 5%; andthe Middle East: 4%) and different sectors (Civil Society: 48%; Industry: 19%; Design: 13%; Academia:10%; Government: 7%; Media: 2%).
During the workshops, participants selected and further defined solutions that would advance Trusted
Design or tackle Deceptive Design (also known as “dark patterns”) based on the opportunities thatemerged from the first workshop. The goal was to produce more concrete examples of solutions orinterventions for Trusted Design that would involve relevant key stakeholders and address the core
challenges of Deceptive Design.
Recommended solutions that emerged from the workshop
The following are the set of recommended solutions and models that groups within the workshops
discussed:
Principles and Guidelines:A set of principles and guidelines for Trusted Design that continuously evolves and serves as bestpractices for product teams to follow and can also be used as evaluation benchmarks. Key principles
such as accessibility and plain language contribute to protect the most vulnerable user groups (e.g. e.g.
older people and those who are less digitally literate, etc) from deceptive design and enhance privacy andsecurity. While principles and guidelines are intended to be universal, there may be varied tiers ofapplication to allow companies to ease into the practices and gradually mature. A set of UX/UI examples
were also developed in one of the workshops—using government online services as an example and how
they can be simplified and designed through a service design approach.
Public awareness campaign through crowdsourced storytelling using animations or games
shared on social media: This idea is intended to amass a global and diverse set of stories and web
users’ experiences of deceptive design and trusted design. These narratives build an inventory of casestudies that serve to tell the impact of Trusted Design, especially highlighting experiences from the Global
South, marginalised groups and less talked about issues such as mental health. The stories would serve
as a foundation for an advocacy campaign online in the form of social media campaigns or animations orgamification techniques. The group decided that leaning on youth activism and the tools available to them(e.g. social media) could be a powerful storytelling force that could maximise reach.

Crowdsourced reporting tool for identification, tracking and response of Deceptive Design: Thisidea would streamline deceptive design detection through the participation of public institutions so that
deceptive design is more visible and reportable, bringing the opportunities to redress the harms ofdeceptive design. The reporting tool would enable crowdsourced data that could generate a visualisation
displaying where deceptive designs are occurring the most. It would also serve as an awareness raisingasset for both users and regulators and can be scalable so more organisations can contribute. Core
existing and credible institutions are connected to the platform so that individuals could find avenues ofenforcement and action.
Evaluation framework: for evaluating impact of the design of a technology platform based on theprinciples and guidelines of Trusted Design. Such an evaluation framework could serve as the basis forregulation or even ‘scoring’ technology. Third party assessors could also look at the evaluations to makesuggestions towards improving on best practices. The framework would also need a core governancemodel to evolve the framework and ensure it is applicable across different contexts.
Global Accreditation System: The idea of global accreditation is to incentivise companies who arelooking to position their brand and hopefully recognise ‘trailblazing’ institutions that are practicing Trusted
Design. The hope is that more companies would seek out such accreditations and practice Trusted
Design, perhaps eventually adopting a cycle of evaluation that would also affect product processes andinternal processes within technology companies.
Internationally applicable regulatory framework that features national-level politically driven regulation,a task force that initiates dialogues (for example, conferences), and international open standards (forexample, W3C or OASIS) that help to converge and maintain consistency. Achieving this framework
would require a granular, multi-pronged, and multi-faceted approach, instead of just solely focusing on
siloed issues. A global coalition could be a good example of an organisation that is responsible for setting
and seeing the ‘norms’ or ‘best practices’ through.
Key insights to guide the work
Regardless of whether the recommendations above are taken forward, there are a set of key insights andcross-cutting recommendations that must guide the work of carrying out such solutions with amulti-sectoral collaborative approach.
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Guidelines and standards are ever-changing. During the workshops, the guidelines for Trusted
Design were continuously built upon, re-mixed, extended and improved through an iterative
process that was gradually more considerate of different perspectives and insights relating to thekey principles. Going forward, it would make sense for the principles and guidelines to be
developed in the ‘open’ so they are continuously evolving based on an ever-changing landscapeand web.
Establish a coalition. Perhaps the foremost task when it comes to establishing best practices
and standards is to set up a coalition or taskforce that is responsible for setting, evolving anddriving the principles, standards and guidelines. There should be a clear governance model for
how these guidelines are iterated upon that also invites participation from others. The coalition
would help converge inputs and maintain consistency.
Global frameworks and global collaboration, but locally driven and enforced. Groups thattalked about regulation agreed on the need for an international regulatory framework that featuresnational-level politically driven regulation. Even an evaluation framework that is based on global
best practices and standards should take context into consideration.

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Involve and center voices from Global South and most vulnerable. The recommended
solutions that emerged largely focused on involving the most vulnerable communities: storytelling
to be led by and/or capturing stories from Global South and most affected communities;
guidelines to be centered on those most vulnerable (e.g. older people and those who are lessdigitally literate, etc). When technology is created based on the lived realities of those that aremost marginalised, the resulting product ends up often being safer, more secure and less harmful
for us all.
Multi-pronged and intersectional approaches. Groups in the workshop brought up how
tackling deceptive design, whether through guidelines, regulation or global collaboration, needed
to involve communities and frameworks from different sectors (for example, consumer protection,human rights, etc) as well as touch upon different aspects (for example, legal, human, business).
Support from a network and wider community. The guidelines can be promoted, distributedand practiced through wider communities that are bought in. Regardless of the solution orintervention discussed at hand, almost every group identified the need to have buy-in from certain
communities: funders, regulators, business-community online and design communities to propel
the models forward and make them work.
○ Multilaterals and global organisations: to help codify and disseminate internationalframeworks○ Product designers: to be partners in identifying deceptive patterns○ Regulators: can use evaluation framework as a criteria to check up on companies, canalso use heat map as evidence○ Researchers, designers, web users and civil society: to flag issues, create heat maps andcrowd-sourced campaigns, and crowdsource methods for large scale audits of systems○ Funders: to fund work such as the story-telling campaign and other advocacy initiatives○ Journalists and advocates getting the word out about Deceptive Design throughadvertising the campaigns and the reporting tool; investigative journalists or academics
that showcase companies could also create more incentives for the private sector to be
more involved.
○ Educators and academics also play an important role as they could help in advocacy andprevention as direct influence.

Remaining questions and needs
During the workshops, some common questions and considerations pervaded many of the breakout
rooms. The following questions reflect the remaining gaps that we collectively need to consider moving
forward and have large implications for how we approach and bring forth Trusted Design.
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What are the right incentives for some of these systems to work? We need incentives fororganisations or people to detect and bring attention to deceptive design, and incentives forthird-party assessors, auditors or accreditation organisations to evaluate companies on theirpractices. What would be the motivating factor for companies and organisations to adopt
standards that they are being evaluated upon? For example, companies may have brandpositioning incentives for being associated with Trusted Design practices—how might we ignite
those incentives more?
There is no incentive for detecting and reporting on deceptive design unless there is a way tointake complaints. How can we ensure that complaints are heard or responded to so thatpeople feel motivated to report in the first place?
What would be the most appropriate approach to jump start or propel some of thesesystems? For example, would a decentralised approach or multilateral approach work better for●●establishing an evaluation framework on Trusted Design? What makes sense to come first—anaccreditation system or an evaluation framework from which that accreditation is based (oncebasic principles and guidelines are established)?
How can we articulate the issues of deceptive design so it can encompass the inter-related
issues that concern different communities, especially beyond the data protection andconsumer protection communities? Do we have a way to translate the problem of deceptive
designs for people in different issue areas for them to understand and tie this to their work? e.g.
how do data protection advocates perceive deceptive designs? How may communities fighting
disinformation perceive manipulations through interface or algorithm designs?
There are more stakeholders that we have yet to identify or engage with more:○ Who is the global body with enough authority and legitimacy that is responsible for
granting accreditations?
○ Who are the existing credible institutions that could help in the identification of deceptive
design patterns (for the crowdsourced reporting tool) so that users can more easily
identify avenues towards enforcement or action?
○ Who might be able to be funders to support raising awareness and building narratives
around deceptive design and its harms to the most vulnerable?
○ How could actors from the global south or other groups representing marginalised people
be motivated and involved in contributing to the principles, guidelines and standards aswell as contributing to story-telling for awareness building purposes?
○ How might we partner with journalists and educators to help spread awareness ofcampaigns or act as oversight?

What’s next?
For the next round of engagements, the Tech Policy Design Lab and its partners at 3x3 and Simply
Secure plan to gather a group of stakeholders who have demonstrated commitment and investment to thework of advancing Trusted Design to review recommendations and discuss the way forward. This
includes:1) Testing prototypes developed on the basis of insights generated by our co-creation workshops
2) Reviewing and shaping recommended solutions for Trusted Design and developing action plans
for further developing and implementing them, and3) Exploring how a potential coalition would carry out the recommended solutions.
If you have any questions or would like to contribute to this final round of reviews and co-creating actionplans for a way forward, please reach out to techlab-workshops@webfoundation.org.