This post is based on a talk given at the 2019 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2019), in Glasgow, UK. The full research paper by Richmond Wong and Deirdre Mulligan that the talk is based on, “Bringing Design to the Privacy Table: Broadening “Design” in “Privacy by Design” Through the Lens of HCI” can be found here: [Official ACM Version] [Open Access Pre-Print Version]

In our paper “Bringing Design to the Privacy Table: Broadening Design in Privacy by Design,” we conduct a curated literature review to make two conceptual argument arguments:

1. There is a broad range of design practices used in human computer interaction (HCI) research which have been underutilized in Privacy By Design efforts.
2. Broadening privacy by design’s notion of what “design” can do can help us more fully address privacy, particularly in situations where we don’t yet know what concepts or definitions of privacy are at stake.

But let me start with some background and motivation. I’m both a privacy researcher—studying studying how to develop technologies that respect privacy—and I’m a design researcher, who designs things to learn about the world.

I was excited several years ago to hear about a growing movement called “Privacy By Design,” the idea that privacy protections should be embedded into products and organizational practice during the design of products, rather than trying to address privacy retroactively. Privacy By Design has been put forward in regulatory guidance from the US and other countries, and more recently by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. Yet these regulations don’t provide a lot of guidance about what Privacy By Design means in practice.

In interactions with and field observations of the interdisciplinary Privacy By Design community—including lawyers, regulators, academics, practitioners, and technical folks—I’ve  found that there is a lot of recognition of the complexity of privacy: that it’s an essentially contested concept, there are many conceptualizations of privacy; privacy from companies is different than privacy from governments; there are different privacy harms, and so forth.

But the discussion of “design” seems much less complex. I had assumed Privacy By Design would have meant applying HCI’s rich breadth of design approaches toward privacy initiatives – user centered design, participatory design, value sensitive design, speculative design, and so on.

Instead, design seemed to be used narrowly, as either a way to implement the law via compliance engineering, or to solve specific privacy problems. Design was largely framed as a deductive way to solve a problem, using approaches such as encryption techniques or building systems to comply with fair information practices. While these are all important and necessary privacy initiatives, but I kept finding myself asking, “where’s the rest of design?” Not just the deductive problem solving aspects of design, but also its the inductive, exploratory, and forward looking aspects.

There’s an opportunity for Privacy By Design to make greater use of the breadth of design approaches used in HCI

There’s a gap here between the way the Privacy By Design views design and the way the HCI community views design. Since HCI researchers and practitioners are in a position to help support or implement privacy by design initiatives, it’s important to try to help broaden the notion of design in Privacy By Design to more fully bridge this gap.

So our paper aims to fulfill 2 goals:

1. Design in HCI is more than just solving problems. We as HCI privacy researchers can more broadly engage the breadth of design approaches in HCI writ large. And there are opportunities to build connections among the HCI privacy research community and HCI design research community & research through design community to use design in relation to privacy in multiple ways.
2. Privacy By Design efforts risk missing out on the full benefits that design can offer if it sticks with a narrower solution and compliance orientation to design. From HCI, we can help build bridges with interdisciplinary Privacy By Design community, and engage them in understanding a broader view of design.  

So how might we characterize the breadth of ways that HCI uses design in relation to privacy? In the paper, we conduct a curated review of HCI research to explore and breadth and richness of how design practices are used in relation to privacy. We searched for HCI papers that use both the terms “privacy” and “design,” curating a corpus of 64 papers. Reading through each paper, we openly coded each one by asking a set of questions including: Why is design used; who is design done by; and for whom is design done? Using affinity diagramming on the open codes, we came up with a set of categories, or dimensions, which we used to re-code the corpus. In this post I’m going to focus on the dimensions that emerged when we looked at the “why design?” question, which we call the purposes of design.

 We describe 4 purposes of design. They are:

• Design to solve a privacy problem;
• Design to inform or support privacy;
• Design to explore people and situations; and
• Design to critique, speculate, and present critical alternatives.

Note that we use these to talk about how design has been used in privacy research specifically, not about all design writ large (that would be quite a different and broader endeavor!). In practice these categories are not mutually exclusive, and are not the only way to look at the space, but looking at them separately helps give some analytical clarity.  Let’s briefly walk through each of these design purposes.

To Solve a Privacy Problem

First, design is seen as a way to solve a privacy problem – which occurred most often in the papers we looked at. And I think this is often how we think about design colloquially, as a set of practices to solve problems. This is often how design is discussed in Privacy By Design discussions as well.

When viewing design in this way, privacy is presented a problem that has already been well-defined at the before the design process, and a solution is designed to address that definition of the problem. A lot of responsibility for protecting privacy here is thus placed in the technical system.

For instance, if a problem of privacy is defined as the harms that result from long term data processing and aggregation, we might design a system that limits data retention. If a problem of privacy is defined as not being identified, we might design a system to be anonymous.

To Inform or Support Privacy

Second, design is seen as a way to inform or support actors who must make privacy-relevant choices, rather than solving a privacy problem outright. This was also common in our set of papers.  Design to inform or support privacy views problems posed by privacy as an information or tools problem. If users receive information in better ways, or have better tools, then they can make more informed choices about how to act in privacy-preserving ways.

A lot of research has been done on how to design usable privacy policies or privacy notices – but it’s still up to the user to read the notice and make a privacy relevant decision. Other types of design work in this vein includes designing privacy icons, controls, dashboards, visualizations, as well as educational materials and activities.

In these approaches, a lot of responsibility for protecting privacy is placed in the choices that people make, informed by a design artifact. The protection of privacy doesn’t arise from the design of the system itself, but rather by how a person chooses to use the system. This orientation towards privacy fits well with US regulations around privacy that make individuals manage and control their own data.

To Explore People and Situations (Related to Privacy)

Third is using design to explore people and situations. Design is used as a mode of inquiry, to better understand what privacy or the experience of privacy means to certain people, in certain situations. Design here is not necessarily about solving an immediate problem.

Techniques like design probes or collaborative design workshops are some approaches here. For example, a project I presented at CSCW 2018 involved presenting booklets with conceptual designs of potentially invasive products to technology practitioners in training. We weren’t looking to gather feedback in order to develop these conceptual ideas into usable products. Instead, the goal was to use these conceptual design ideas as provocations to better understand the participants’ worldviews. How are they conceptualizing privacy when they see these designs? How do their reactions help us understand where they place responsibility for addressing privacy?

Here, privacy is understood as a situated experience, which emerges from practices from particular groups in specific contexts or situations. The goal is less about solving a privacy problem, and more about understanding how privacy gets enacted and experienced.

To Critique, Speculate, or Present Critical Alternatives About Privacy

Fourth is design to critique, speculate, or present critical alternatives. (By critical I don’t mean bad or mean, but instead I mean critical like reflexive reflection or careful analysis).  Design here is not about exploring the world as it is, but focuses on how the world could be. Often this consists of creating create conceptual designs that provoke, to create a space to surface and discuss social values. These help us discuss worlds we might strive to achieve or ones we want to avoid. Privacy in this case is situated in different possible sociotechnical configurations of the world, thinking about privacy’s social, legal, and technical aspects together.

For example, in a project I presented at DIS 2017, we created advertisements for fictional sensing products, like a bodily implant for workplace employees. This helped us raise questions beyond basic data collection and use ones. The designs helped us ask questions about how is privacy implicated in the workplace, or through employment law? Can consent really occur with these power dynamics? It also helped us ask normative questions, such as: Who gets to have privacy and who doesn’t? Who or what should be responsible for protecting privacy? Might we look to technical design, to regulations, to market mechanisms, or to individual choice to protect privacy?

Design Is a Political, Values-Laden Choice

So in summary these are the 4 purposes of design that we identified in this paper: using design to solve, to inform and support, to explore, and to critique and speculate. Again, in practice, they’re not discrete categories. Many design approaches, like user centered design, or participatory design, use design for multiple design purposes.

But this variety of purposes for how design relates to privacy is also a reminder that design isn’t a neutral process, but is itself political and values-laden. (Not political in terms of liberal and conservative, but political in the sense that there is power and social implications in the choices we make about how to use design). Each design purpose suggests a different starting place for how we orient ourselves towards conceptualizing and operationalizing privacy. We might think about privacy as:

• a technical property;
• as a user-made choice;
• as situated experiences;
• as privacy as sociotechnically situated.

Privacy can be many and all of these things at once, but the design methods we choose, and the reasons why we choose to use design helps to suggest or foreclose different orientations toward privacy. These choices also suggest that responsibility for privacy might be placed in different places — such as in a technical system, in a person’s choices, in a platform’s policies, in the law, in the market, and so forth.

Now I’ve been discussing these 4 design purposes equally, but they weren’t equal in our corpus. Allowing each paper to be coded for multiple categories, a little over half the papers we looked at used design to solve a privacy problem and a little over half used design to inform or support. Less than a quarter used design to explore; even fewer used design to critique and speculate. We don’t claim that the exact percentages are representative of all the privacy literature, but there’s a qualitative difference here, where most of the work we reviewed uses design to solve privacy problems or support and inform privacy.

We are arguing for a big tent approach in privacy by design: using design in all of these ways helps us address a broader set of conceptions of privacy.

This suggests that there’s an opportunity for us to build bridges between the HCI privacy research community, which has rich domain expertise; and the HCI design research & research through design communities, which have rich design methods expertise, particularly using design in ways to explore, and to critique and speculate.

So that’s Argument 1, that we have the opportunity to build new bridges among HCI communities to more fully make use of each others’ expertise, and a broader range of design methods and purposes.

Argument 2 is that Privacy By Design has largely (with some exceptions) thought about design as a problem solving process.  Privacy By Design research and practice could expand on that thinking of design to make more use of a fuller breadth of uses of design that are reflected in HCI.

Implications for Design Collaboration

So what might some of these collaborations within and across fields look like, if we want to make use of more of design’s breadth? For example if we as privacy researchers, develop a set of usable privacy tools to inform and support most people’s privacy decision making; that might be complemented with design to explore so that we can better understand the often marginalized populations for whom those tools don’t work. For instance Diana Freed et al.’s work shows that social media privacy and security tools can be used against victims of intimate partner violence, violating their privacy and safety. Or, an emerging set of problems we face is thinking about privacy in physically instrumented spaces: how does consent work, what conceptions of privacy and privacy risk are at play? We can complement design to solve and design to support efforts with design to critique and speculate; to craft future scenarios that try to understand what concepts of privacy might be at play, and how privacy can surface differently when technical, social, or legal aspects of the world change.

From a design research perspective, I think there’s growing interest in the design research community to create provocative artifacts to try to surface discussions about privacy, particularly in relation to new and emerging technologies. Critically reflecting on my own design research work, I think it can be tempting to just speak to other designers and resort to conceptions of privacy that say “surveillance is creepy” and not dig deeper into other approaches to privacy. But by collaborating with privacy researchers, we can bring more domain expertise and theoretical depth to these design explorations and speculations, and engage a broader set of privacy stakeholders.

Industry privacy practitioners working on privacy by design initiatives might consider incorporating more UX researchers and designers form their organizations, as privacy allies and as design experts.  Approaches that use design to critique and speculate may also align well with privacy practitioners’ stated desire to find contextual and anticipatory privacy tools to help “think around corners”, as reported by Ken Bamberger and Deirdre Mulligan.

Privacy By Design regulators could incorporate more designers (in addition to engineers and computer scientists) in regulatory discussions about privacy by design, so that this richness of design practice isn’t lost when the words “by design” are written in the law.

Moreover, there’s an opportunity here for us an HCI community to bring HCI’s rich notions of what design can mean to Privacy By Design, so that beyond being a problem solving process, it is also seen as a process that also makes use of the multi-faceted, inductive, and exploratory uses of design that this community engages in.

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Paper Citation: Richmond Y. Wong and Deirdre K. Mulligan. 2019. Bringing Design to the Privacy Table: Broadening “Design” in “Privacy by Design” Through the Lens of HCI. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 262, 17 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300492

This post summarizes a research paper, Bringing Design to the Privacy Table, written by Richmond Wong and Deirdre Mulligan. The paper will be presented at the 2019 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2019) on Wednesday, May 8 at the 4pm “Help Me, I’m Only Human” paper session.

How might the richness and variety in human computer interaction (HCI) design practices and approaches be utilized in addressing privacy during the development of technologies?

U.S. policy recommendations and the E.U.’s General Data Protection have helped concept of privacy by design (PBD)—embedding privacy protections into products during the initial design phase, rather than retroactively—gain traction. Yet while championing “privacy by design,” these regulatory discussions offer little in the way of concrete guidance about what “by design” means in technical and design practice. Engineering communities have begun developing privacy engineering techniques, to use design as a way to find privacy solutions. Many privacy engineering tools focus on design solutions that translate high level principles into implementable engineering requirements.  However, design in HCI has a much richer concept of what “design” might entail: it also includes thinking about design as a way to explore the world and to critique and speculate about the world. Embracing this richness of design approaches can help privacy by design more fully approach the privacy puzzle.

To better understand the richness of ways design practices can related to privacy, we conducted a curated review of 64 HCI research papers that discuss both privacy and design. One thing we looked at was how each paper viewed the purpose of design in relation to privacy. (Papers could be classified into multiple categories, so percentages add up to over 100). We found four main design purposes:

• To Solve a Privacy Problem (56% of papers) – This aligns with the common perception of design, that design is used to solve problems. This includes creating system architectures and data management systems in ways that collect and use data in privacy-preserving ways. The problems posed by privacy are generally well-defined before the design process; a solution is then designed to address that problem.
• To Inform or Support Privacy (52%) – Design is also used to inform or support people who must make privacy-relevant choices, rather than solving a privacy problem outright. A lot of these papers use design to increase the usability of privacy notices and controls to allow end users to more easily make choices about their privacy. These approaches generally assume that if people have the “right” types of tools and information, then they will choose to act in more privacy-preserving ways.
• To Explore People and Situations (22%) – Design can be used as a form of inquiry to understand people and situations. Design activities, probes, or conceptual design artifacts might be shared with users and stakeholders to understand their experiences and concerns about privacy. Privacy is thus viewed here as relating to different social and cultural contexts and practices; design is used as a way to explore what privacy means in these different situations.
• To Critique, Speculate, or Present Critical Alternatives (11%) – Design can be used to create spaces in which people can discuss values, ethics, and morals—including privacy. Rather than creating immediately deployable design solutions, design here works like good science fiction: creating conceptual designs that try to provoke people into think about relationships among technical, social, and legal aspects of privacy and ask questions such as who gets (or doesn’t get) to have privacy, or who should be responsible for providing privacy.

One thing we found interesting is how some design purposes tend to narrowly define what privacy means or define privacy before the design process, whereas others view privacy as more socially situated and use the process of design itself to help define privacy.

For those looking towards how these dimensions might be useful in privacy by design practice, we mapped our dimensions onto a range of design approaches and methodologies common in HCI, in the table below.

These findings can be of use to several communities:

• HCI privacy researchers and PBD researchers might use this work to reflect on dominant ways in which design has been used thus far (to solve privacy problems, and to inform or support privacy), and begin to explore a broader range of design purposes and approaches in privacy work.
• HCI design researchers might use this work to see how expertise in research through design methods could be married with privacy domain expertise, suggesting potential new collaborations and engagements.
• Industry Privacy Practitioners can begin reaching out to UX researchers and designers in their own organizations both as design experts and as allies in privacy by design initiatives. In particularly, the forward-looking aspects of speculative and critical design approaches may also align well with privacy practitioners’ desire to find contextual and anticipatory privacy tools to help “think around corners”.
• Policymakers should include designers (in addition to engineers and computer scientists) in regulatory discussions about privacy by design (or other “governance by design” initiatives). Many regulators seem to view “design” in “privacy by design” as a way to implement decisions made in law, or as a relatively straightforward way to solve privacy problems. However, this narrow view risks hiding the politics of design; what is left unexamined in these discussions is that different design approaches also suggest different orientations and conceptualizations of privacy. HCI design practices, which have already been used in relation to privacy, suggest a broader set of ways to approach privacy by design.

Our work aims to bridge privacy by design research and practice with HCI’s rich variety of design research. By doing so, we can help encourage more holistic discussions about privacy, drawing connections among privacy’s social, legal, and technical aspects.

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Download a pre-print version of the full paper here.

Paper Citation:
Richmond Y. Wong and Deirdre K. Mulligan. 2019. Bringing Design to the Privacy Table: Broadening “Design” in “Privacy by Design” Through the Lens of HCI. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300492

This post is crossposted on Medium

In the spirit of taking a break over the holidays, this is more of a fun post with some very rough thoughts (though inspired by some of my prior work on paying attention to and critiquing narratives and futures portrayed by tech advertising). The basic version is that the Cricket Wireless 2018 Holiday Ad, Four the Holidays (made by ad company Psyop), portrays a narrative that makes a slight critique of an always-connected world and suggests that physical face-to-face interaction is a more enjoyable experience for friends than digital sharing. While perhaps a over-simplistic critique of mobile technology use, the twin messages of “buy a wireless phone plan to connect with friends” and “try to disconnect to spend time with friends” highlight important tensions and contradictions present in everyday digital life.

But let’s look at the ad in a little more detail!

Last month, while streaming Canadian curling matches (it’s more fun than you might think, case in point, I’ve blogged about the sport’s own controversy with broom technology) there was a short Cricket ad playing with a holiday jingle. And I’m generally inclined to pay attention to an ad with a good jingle. Looking it up online brought up a 3 minute long short film version expanding upon the 15 second commercial (embedded above), which I’ll describe and analyze below.

It starts with Cricket’s animated characters Ramon (the green blob with hair), Dusty (the orange fuzzy ball), Chip (the blue square), and Rose (the green oblong shape) on a Hollywood set, “filming” the aforementioned commercial, singing their jingle:

The four, the merrier! Cricket keeps us share-ier!

Four lines of unlimited data, for a hundred bucks a month!

After their shoot is over, Dusty wants the group to watch fireworks from the Cricket water tower (which is really the Warner Brothers Studio water tower, though maybe we should call it Chekov’s water tower in this instance) on New Year’s Eve. Alas, the crew has other plans, and everyone flies to their holiday destinations: Ramon to Mexico, Dusty to Canada, Chip to New York, and Rose to Aspen.

The video then shows each character enjoying the holidays in their respective locations with their smartphones. Ramon uses his phone to take pictures of food shared on a family table; Rose uses hers to take selfies on a ski lift.

The first hint that there might be a message critiquing an always-connected world is when the ad shows Dusty in a snowed-in, remote Canadian cabin. Presumably this tells us that he gets a cell signal up there, but in this scene, he is not using his phone. Rather, he’s making cookies with his two (human) nieces (not sure how that works, but I’ll suspend my disbelief), highlighting a face-to-face familial interaction using a traditional holiday group activity.

The second hint that something might not be quite right is the dutch angel establishing shot of New York City in the next scene. The non-horizontal horizon line (which also evokes the off-balance establishing shot of New York from an Avengers: Infinity War trailer) visually puts the scene off balance. But the moment quickly passes, as we see Chip on the streets of New York taking instagram selfies.

Then comes a rapid montage of photos and smiling selfies that the group is sending and sharing with each other, in a sort of digital self-presentation utopia. But as the short film has been hinting at, this utopia is not reflective of the characters’ lived experience.

The video cuts to Dusty, skating alone on a frozen pond, successfully completing a trick, but then realizes that he has no one to share the moment with. He then sings “The four the merrier, Cricket keeps us share-ier” in a minor key as re-envisions clouds in the sky as the form of the four friends. The minor key and Dusty’s singing show skepticism in the lyrics’ claim that being share-ier is indeed merrier.

The minor key continues, as Ramon sings while envisioning a set of holiday lights as the four friends, and Rose sees a department store window display as the four friends. Chip attends a party where the Cricket commercial (from the start of the video) airs on a TV, but is still lonely. Chip then hails a cab, dramatically stating in a deep voice “Take me home.”

In the last scene, Chip sits atop the Cricket Water Tower (or, Chekov’s Water Tower returns!) at 11:57pm on New Year’s Eve, staring alone at his phone, discontent. This is the clearest signal about the lack of fulfillment he finds from his phone, and by extension, the digitally mediated connection with his friends.

Immediately this is juxtaposed with Ramon singing with his guitar from the other side of the water tower, still in the minor key. Chip hears him and immediately becomes happier, and the music shifts to a major key as Rose and Dusty enter as the tempo picks up, and the drums and orchestra of instruments join in. And the commercial ends with the four of them watching New Year’s fireworks together. It’s worth noting the lyrics at the end:

Ramon: The four the merrier…

Chip [spoken]: Ramon?! You’re here!

Rose: There’s something in the air-ier

All: That helps us connect, all the season through. The four, the merrier

Dusty: One’s a little harrier (So hairy!)

All: The holidays are better, the holidays are better, the holidays are better with your crew.

Nothing here is explicitly about Cricket wireless, or the value of being digitally connected. It’s also worth noting that the phone that Chip was previously staring at is nowhere to be found after he sees Ramon. There is some ambiguous use of the word “connect,” which could refer to both a face-to-face interaction or a digitally mediated one, but the tone of the scene and emotional storyline bringing the four friends physically together seems to suggest that connect refers to the value of face-to-face interaction.

So what might this all mean (beyond the fact that I’ve watched this commercial too many times and have the music stuck in my head)? Perhaps the larger and more important point is that the commercial/short film is emblematic of a series of tensions around connection and disconnection in today’s society. Being digitally connected is seen as a positive that allows for greater opportunity (and greater work output), but at the same time discontent is reflected in culture and media, ranging from articles on tech addiction, to guides on grayscaling iPhones to combat color stimulation, to disconnection camps. There’s also a moralizing force behind these tensions: to be a good employee/student/friend/family member/etc, we are told that we must be digitally connected and always-on, but at the same time, we are told that we must also be dis-connected or interact face-to-face in order to be good subjects.

In many ways, the tensions expressed in this video — an advertisement for a wireless provider trying to encourage customers to sign up for their wireless plans, while presenting a story highlighting the need to digitally disconnect — parallels the tensions that Ellie Harmon and Melissa Mazmanian find in their analysis of media discourse of smartphones: that there is both a push for individuals to integrate the smartphone into everyday life, and to dis-integrate the smartphone from everyday life. What is fascinating to me here is that this video from Cricket exhibits both of those ideas at the same time. As Harmon and Mazmanian write,

The stories that circulate about the smartphone in American culture matter. They matter for how individuals experience the device, the ways that designers envision future technologies, and the ways that researchers frame their questions.

While Four the Holidays doesn’t tell the most complex or nuanced story about connectivity and smartphone use, the narrative that Cricket and Psyop created veers away from a utopian imagining of the world with tech, and instead begins to reflect  some of the inherent tensions and contradictions of smartphone use and mobile connectivity that are experienced as a part of everyday life.