Evil by Design
Design ethics, case studies, dark patterns, and some tools and techniques to ask hard questions and design products that won’t ruin your company.
I’ll talk about the ethos of “makers”—how making things and simply being creative for the sake of creativity can be a bad thing, if we’re not willing to be responsible for our legacy and pretend that “design isn’t political.” I’ll show many case studies of companies and products that are making our lives and our society worse—sometimes unintentionally. I’ll talk about dark patterns and how they could cost millions of dollars—and, sometimes, human lives. And I’ll share three areas of transformation where we as an industry can get better:
Good design: prevent dark patterns and ensure accessibility and inclusion
Good process: ask future-proofing questions to detect ethical risk zones
Good company: share beliefs and values that empower our partners and us to care about people, together.
Kit Oliynyk
I’m a senior creative director at Capital One, passionate about design culture, design ops and design storytelling. My job is is fostering a strong design organization at large scale and integrating a human-centric design culture across the entire company, while empowering designers to get better as people and as professionals, develop their careers and share their stories of design impact. While having a strong background in product, service and interaction design, I’m constantly learning, and I’m sharing my knowledge with our designers, our business partners and the design industry worldwide.
