CHI 2026 Workshop: "Bridge Over Troubled Water" — Deceptive Design, Ethics, and Commercial Incentives
On Thursday, April 16, 2026, we held our CHI 2026 workshop Bridge Over Troubled Water in Barcelona, Spain — Aligning Commercial Incentives with Ethical Design Practice to Combat Deceptive Patterns. I was glad to contribute as one of the organizers, serving as a Publications Chair alongside a cool team of collegues.
The workshop brought together practitioners and scholars in a transdisciplinary setting to work on approaches that can serve both users and service providers, against a backdrop of growing awareness of deceptive design (often called dark patterns), tightening regulation, and strained trust in digital services.
We focused the day on:
- Gaps and alignment between user expectations and commercial incentives — including when user and provider interests can align against more dominant market players
- Assessing contemporary design practices — distinguishing patterns that are consistently harmful from those that are more context-dependent, and how they connect to user agency
- Rerouting user journeys toward informed choice — using value-sensitive and ethical design perspectives in collaborative exercises to explore fairer alternatives
The programme combined roundtable discussions and hands-on collaborative activities so that HCI research and practice could meet in the middle of lived constraints, not only abstract principles.
We accepted 14 contributions across the workshop tracks and used lightning introductions to surface a broad set of perspectives, domains, and methodological approaches for the collaborative sessions.
Below you can browse the workshop slides:
Thank you to all participants for the energy and ideas they brought to the room!