Dark Patterns tries to force ethical U.I. Design practices

I'm really interested in the psychology of design and optimising design to manipulate and audiences response. I have also been painfully aware for a long time that certain processes are deliberately difficult to execute in order to dissuade people from going through with them. Harry Brignull recently put together this presentation outlining some of the methods used by less scrupulous sites and provides a place to name and shame services that employ such methods in order to force companies to employ more ethical principals of design.

Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People (Presented at UX Brighton 2010)

View more webinars from Harry Brignull.

Going With The Crowd

I've come to realize that the future is going to be user generated. We will see the rise of all things user generated from Magazines to News Agencies, and as connectivity becomes more and more mobile so updates and amendments will be come more frequent. The news will be almost impossible to censor but it will also be highly influence-able by less than scrupulous individuals??? Perhaps; but perhaps it will self censor and self correct itself. My theory is this if you have a piece of software that monitors reports and then works out the "true" story by cross referencing the facts that have been submitted. And since such a site would be community based it would be policed by the community this could be achieved by making the stories submitted public as well as the identity of those who submitted them. Another example of this would be crowd sourcing brand ambassadors like for example the recent benetton campaign its:my:time is a good example of this I entered to see how it worked and I'm not sure if it does just yet, but from the looks of it there were a lot of entrants who are pretty handy with scripting automated voting apps (don't worry I'm not dissapointed with the number of votes I recieved I wasn't expecting any to be honest) but it brings me back to my point that systems can be manipulated and skewed if measures aren't put in place to compensate.