Call for Papers

Nowadays, tech companies adopt attention-capture dark patterns like recommendations and content autoplay to grab people’s attention and maximize the time spent on different digital services, from social networks to video sharing platforms. Such a controversial business model exploits the individual’s psychological vulnerabilities to increase advertisements revenue, and has several measurable consequences on individuals’ sense of agency, often resulting in people’s lack of control over technology use. In this context, public media and researchers in different areas, from philosophy to human-computer interaction, agree on the importance of considering a new kind of psychological digital wellbeing.

The purpose of this workshop is to provide the academic and industrial communities a venue for discussing ongoing research and ideas on the design of interfaces that allow people to take advantage of digital platforms in a meaningful and conscious way, without the need for external interventions (e.g., timers) that indiscriminately block the user’s interaction. This could be done with either novel Digital Self-Control Tools (DSCTs), which allows people to limit their technology use through the redesign of interactive elements, or by finding ways to motivate key stakeholders to avoid or mitigate attention-capture dark patterns from the beginning of their design processes.

We invite researchers and practitioners in interdisciplinary domains intersecting HCI, AI, psychology, design, and/or STS to engage in dialog on the topics above. A key priority of our workshop will be to invite submissions from an intellectually diverse and global group of participants to further discussions on how appropriate human-centered design can contribute to digital wellbeing in this context. In particular, we solicit participation across more and less technical researchers in HCI who are motivated to address the list of topics below.

Topics of Interest

The topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to:

definition and analysis of attention-capture dark patterns;

novel interfaces for meaningful interaction;

novel DSCTs that focus on redesigning the user’s interaction rather than blocking it;

design methods and tools for digital wellbeing;

strategies and tools for measuring people’s digital wellbeing;

responsibility and role of tech companies;

social, educational, and political factors.

Participation and Submission

We will invite submissions of position papers in the ACM Primary Article Submission Templates (single column), of 2-4 pages in length.

PDFs of submissions can be emailed to Alberto Monge Roffarello (one of the organizers) at alberto.monge@polito.it. They will be reviewed by all organizers based on relevance, originality, and overall quality. Upon acceptance, at least one author of each accepted paper will be required to attend the workshop. Virtual participation will be made possible.

All workshop participants will need to register for the workshop. Accepted and presented papers will be published on our website. Notifications will be mailed to the authors within 15 days of receipt (and no later than the date reported below).

Important Dates

Workshop submissions due: March 27, 2022 April 10, 2022

Results announced: April 27, 2022

Camera-readies and registration due: May 8, 2022

Workshop date: June 6, 2022 (2:30 PM - 6:30 PM CEST)