Summary
Deceptive design has a long prehistory. Before it became a recognised field with legal and regulatory consequences, it lived quietly in user interfaces, persuasive patterns, and the small frictions that nudged people into choices they never quite meant to make. This fireside chat brings together three leading voices to trace that evolution and map its next steps. Dr Harry Brignull opens with the historical and cultural arc of deceptive design, showing how early interface tricks solidified into a taxonomy and a movement. Author Robert Stribley then guides the conversation into the world of privacy-protective design, examining why users often remain indifferent to risks, why organisations struggle to prioritise privacy, and how better design principles can restore agency rather than erode it. Dr Mark Leiser closes by shifting from screens to systems. His work reveals how dark patterns now extend far beyond the UI, emerging in algorithmic optimisation, platform architecture, and AI-driven inference. This is where deceptive design becomes a structural problem, not a cosmetic one, and where law, regulation, and system design collide. Together, Brignull, Stribley, and Leiser explore how design, privacy, and digital regulation are becoming inseparable, and what it will take to build technologies that respect people rather than manipulate them. The result is an interdisciplinary, future-facing conversation about one of the most urgent challenges in the digital environment today.
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