edbx-designskills

Use when a designer wants to challenge their own assumptions about a product or feature, check for unconscious bias in design decisions, consider perspectives of users unlike themselves, reframe a design mistake as a learning opportunity, or practice perspective-taking and inclusive design thinking. Apply the Another Lens principle to surface personal biases, blind spots, and worldview assumptions embedded in a design or product. Trigger this skill for any mention of bias in design, inclusive design, perspective-taking, worldview assumptions, challenging design decisions, who am I designing for, representation in design, or when someone says "I'm not sure I've thought about this from enough angles." Also trigger for "another lens", "check my bias", "what am I missing", "whose perspective", or "design self-reflection".

Use when a designer needs to critique a design, flow, feature, or concept for dark patterns and anti-user values, run reverse brainstorming to expose worst-possible solutions, generate ethical concept alternatives, or facilitate ethical dialogue in a team using shared Anti-Hero / Hero language. Use the Anti-Heroes card method to surface manipulative design intentions and pair them with ethical Hero counterparts. Lean toward this skill whenever the user mentions dark patterns, manipulative design, deceptive UX, ethical review, anti-patterns, designer responsibility, or wants to "break my design" before shipping.

Use when a designer wants to stress-test a product idea for unintended negative consequences before launch, question whether a solution addresses root causes or applies band-aids, identify who is being harmed or excluded by a design, evaluate a product across cultural, social, environmental, and safety implications, or run a structured pre-launch bad design audit across 12 consequence categories. Apply the Bad Design Canvas to systematically uncover the unintended negative consequences a product or service might generate — from cultural appropriation and inequity to environmental impact and exploitation. Trigger this skill for any mention of unintended consequences, pre-launch ethical review, who does this harm, stress-testing a design, bad design audit, break my design, or when someone says "let's think about what could go wrong with this product." Also trigger for "bad design canvas", "consequence mapping", "negative impact audit", "12 consequence categories", or "what harm does this cause."

Use when a user wants to pressure-test a product, feature, or concept for ethical risk; explore "what could go wrong"; do critical/speculative design; run a Black Mirror-style brainstorm or anti-goal workshop; build a Black Mirror "episode" pitch around a design; or surface dystopian misuse scenarios before shipping. Trigger even when the user asks vaguely about "unintended consequences," "dark patterns waiting to happen," "harm anticipation," or "ethical red-teaming" of a feature. Speculative, anti-goal ideation for digital products and services in the spirit of the Black Mirror Netflix series. Take on the role of a science fiction filmmaker to imagine how a product could be misused or cause unintended harm — across economic, political, and social dimensions — and turn those stories into concrete anti-goals the team can design against.

Use when a designer wants to identify hidden assumptions about user ability, capacity, or environment, audit a design for exclusionary patterns, generate inclusive design alternatives through structured assumption-busting, facilitate a team assumption-sharing session, or grow a shared knowledge base of design biases. Apply the CIDER elicitation framework to surface implicit assumptions embedded in a design, envision how those assumptions exclude users, and generate more inclusive alternatives. Trigger this skill for any mention of inclusive design, exclusionary design, assumption auditing, accessibility assumptions, stereotype checking in design, who is being excluded, or when someone says "I want to make sure this works for everyone." Also trigger for "CIDER", "assumption audit", "who can't use this", "inclusion check", or "accessibility assumptions".

Use when a researcher or designer wants to understand the "why" behind participant responses, uncover implicit values and ethical reasoning in design teams or users, prepare interview protocols with lead-off, back-up, emergency, and follow-up questions, identify covert categories around power, ethics, or belief, or probe ethical discomfort and moral reasoning in design practice. Design and facilitate Critical Interviewing protocols that surface the normative and evaluative judgments underlying participants' behaviors, beliefs, and design decisions. Trigger this skill for any mention of interviewing for values, ethical probing in research, understanding designer beliefs, normative research, critical ethnography in design, or when someone says "I need to understand why people make the decisions they do." Also trigger for "Critical Interviewing", "values interview", "ethical probing", "normative interview", or "designer values research".

Use when a designer wants to stress-test a product idea or existing feature for negative impacts, explore the dark side of something they're building, ask "is this ethical?", check for unintended harms, reflect on design responsibility, define their design values, or articulate what kind of designer they want to be. Run a DAH (Design Against Humanity) Cards session to audit products and features for ethical harms, map hidden consequences, build a personal ethical manifesto, and draft a future design vision. Also trigger for phrases like "ethical review", "dark patterns audit", "design against humanity", "responsible design", "value alignment", or any moment when a team is uncomfortable with where a product is going.

Use when a designer, product manager, or AI practitioner wants to reflect on the ethical dimensions of data collection and use, evaluate automation and AI features for manipulation or unfairness, assess whether intentions and processes are transparent to users, apply a structured heuristic framework to data-intensive or AI-powered products, or run a broad ethical health check on a product. Apply the Digital Ethics Compass heuristics to evaluate a product or business across four ethical dimensions — Data, Avoid Manipulation, Make Intentions Transparent, and Automation — putting the human at the center of every decision. Trigger this skill for any mention of data ethics, AI ethics, automation ethics, behavioral manipulation, transparency obligations, responsible AI, or when someone asks "is our data practice ethical?" Also trigger for "Digital Ethics Compass", "data ethics audit", "AI ethics", "automation fairness", "responsible AI", or "ethical health check".

Use when a team wants to formalize shared ethical commitments across disciplines, assign individual ethical responsibilities to specific roles, create a living ethics manifesto for a project, bring new team members into ethical alignment, hold all stakeholders accountable to design ethics, or escalate from informal pledges to a signed collective agreement. Facilitate the creation of an Ethical Contract — a signed, shared document that negotiates ethical objectives and responsibilities across all stakeholders in a product team. Trigger this skill for any mention of team ethics agreement, shared ethical responsibility, ethics sign-off, stakeholder ethical alignment, design manifesto, or when someone says "we need everyone on the same page about ethics, not just the design team." Also trigger for "Ethical Contract", "ethics sign-off", "ethical manifesto", "stakeholder ethics", or "team ethics agreement".

Use when a researcher, senior designer, or team lead wants to conduct a deep post-hoc ethical analysis of a design process, identify moments where value-centered vs. manipulative thinking shaped decisions, map the ethical trajectory of a design project over time, code design decisions by ethical intent and impact, or build an evidence base for ethical design research. Apply Ethicography to analyze design decisions and team speech acts for their explicit or implicit ethical dimensions, mapping the value-centered vs. manipulative nature of each decision on a persuasion-to-coercion axis. Trigger this skill for any mention of ethical design analysis, design decision audit, value-centered design research, mapping ethics in design process, analyzing design team ethics, or when someone says "I want to understand the ethical quality of our design decisions, not just the outcomes." Also trigger for "Ethicography", "ethical moves", "design decision ethics", "speech act analysis", or "ethical trajectory".

Use when a designer wants to audit a product for dark or deceptive UI patterns, find the ethical alternative to a known dark pattern, apply fair pattern countermeasures that restore user agency, evaluate defaults as harmful vs. protective, rewrite manipulative UI language into plain and empowering language, or map a product's deceptive patterns against a taxonomy of known dark pattern types. Identify dark patterns in a digital product or service and apply fair pattern countermeasures to correct them. Trigger this skill for any mention of dark patterns, deceptive design, manipulative UI, user agency, roach motel, confirmshaming, hidden costs, forced continuity, privacy zuckering, or when someone says "is this pattern manipulating our users?" Also trigger for "Fair Patterns", "dark patterns audit", "deceptive design", "manipulative UI", "user agency", or "ethical UI patterns".

Use when a designer, researcher, or product manager wants to audit how a product exploits human vulnerabilities, identify where design harms attention or emotional wellbeing, surface dark patterns around addiction or deception, generate opportunity areas for more humane product design, or evaluate against Center for Humane Technology principles. Apply the Humane Design Guide framework to evaluate a product or feature against six human sensitivities — Attention, Emotional, Sensemaking, Decision-making, Social Reasoning, and Group Dynamics — and generate humane design alternatives. Trigger this skill for any mention of humane technology, attention exploitation, addictive design, emotional harm in UX, filter bubbles, dark patterns in social products, or when someone asks "is this product respecting its users?" Also trigger for "humane design", "human sensitivities", "attention design", "digital wellbeing", "center for humane technology", or "humane design guide".

Use when a designer wants to identify what behaviors a feature is likely to trigger beyond its intended use, forecast unintended consequences of behavior design, evaluate features through a persuasive technology lens, map motivational factors that drive behavior toward or away from intended outcomes, or audit a product for potentially harmful behavioral outcomes. Apply the Inverted Behavior Model to forecast the full range of behaviors — intended and unintended — that a product feature motivates, and map their consequences for users and society. Trigger this skill for any mention of behavior design, unintended user behavior, persuasive technology audit, forecasting feature consequences, BJ Fogg behavior model, or when someone asks "what will users actually do with this?" Also trigger for "Inverted Behavior Model", "behavior forecast", "persuasive technology review", "behavior audit", or "unintended consequences".

Use when a designer or researcher wants to audit a product for manipulative patterns, map user motivations across different contexts, generate ethical design criteria, evaluate products against motivational incentives, or identify dark patterns in behavioral design. Apply the Motivation Matrix method to analyze how different user motivations — Achievement, Social Acceptance, Fear, Power, and Incentive — interact with product or service contexts. Trigger this skill for any mention of motivation mapping, ethical auditing of a product, dark patterns analysis, designing for diverse user contexts, behavioral design ethics, or when someone asks "are we manipulating users?" Also trigger for "motivation matrix", "user motivation", "behavioral design", "manipulative patterns", or "what motivates our users".

Use when a designer wants to assess a design decision against established ethical theory, brainstorm design alternatives rooted in normative ethics, evaluate whether a product's intention, effects, and design obligations are aligned, apply philosophical ethics frameworks to concrete design problems, or explain design decisions using ethical theory language. Apply the Normative Design Scheme to evaluate design goals and generate design ideas through three normative ethical lenses — Virtue Ethics (intention), Consequentialism (effect), and Deontology (design/duty). Trigger this skill for any mention of applying ethics theories to design, design duty or obligation, consequences of design decisions, virtue in design, deontological design review, or when someone asks "what is the ethically right thing to do here?" Also trigger for "Normative Design Scheme", "ethics lenses", "virtue ethics design", "deontology design", or "consequentialism design".

Use when a designer, team, or organization wants to articulate concrete ethical commitments for a project, translate vague values into actionable pledges, create role-based or context-specific ethical promises, hold a team accountable to ethical outcomes over time, connect everyday design decisions to larger responsible design goals, or formalize the outputs of other ethical design methods into commitments. Facilitate the writing of design pledges — Simple Pledges and Responsible Stories — that translate ethical intentions into specific, accountable commitments linked to design work. Trigger this skill for any mention of design commitments, ethical pledges, accountability in design, team ethics agreements, responsible design promises, or when someone says "we agreed this matters but we never actually committed to doing anything about it." Also trigger for "Pledge Works", "design pledge", "responsible story", "ethical commitment", or "team values agreement".

Use when a designer, product manager, or researcher wants to identify dark patterns in an existing product, evaluate where their design sits on the responsible/irresponsible spectrum, facilitate team self-reflection on design ethics, map business incentives against user wellbeing, generate transition paths from dark to responsible design, or answer questions about fair practice guidelines. Apply the Responsible Design Prism framework to audit, evaluate, and reframe design artifacts across the spectrum from dark patterns to responsible design. Trigger this skill for any mention of dark patterns, responsible design, design ethics audit, manipulation in UX, fair UX, ethical product design, or when someone asks "is this design ethical?". Also trigger for "responsible design prism", "dark pattern audit", "design spectrum", "fair practice", "ethical UX", or "manipulative design".

Ethical design specialist. Describe your product, feature, or decision and get routed to the right ethical design method(s) from a set of 21 validated skills. Use when you don't know which edbx:* skill to start with, or when you want an expert recommendation on what to run and in what order.

Use when an individual, team, or organization wants to put ethical values into action around a product, policy, research project, or technology decision. Apply the Stanford McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society Ethics Toolkit — a five-tool, three-phase chainable framework that moves from exploration to evaluation to decision-making. Each tool produces structured outputs that feed directly into the next. Trigger this skill for any mention of ethical impact assessment, future consequences of work, societal benefits and harms, value trade-offs, ethical decision-making, or when someone says "is this ethical?", "what are the implications of this?", "how do we make this decision responsibly?", or "I need to evaluate our ethical position." Also trigger for "Stanford ethics toolkit", "Future Story", "Impacts Explorer", "Ethics Frame", "Ethics Gauge", "Weighing Options", "Value Cards", "ethical assessment", "societal impact", "ethics chain", or "stf-et".

Use when a designer or team needs to identify features that stakeholders are strongly opposed to, map the difference between what stakeholders block vs. support, balance competing disciplinary, human, and business values, navigate organizational policy conflicts, or facilitate a structured trade-off discussion. Apply the Value Dams and Flows method to map stakeholder value conflicts and consensuses in a design space, identifying which features or policies are blocked (dams) versus which can move forward (flows), and generating strategies to navigate the trade-offs. Trigger this skill for any mention of value trade-offs, stakeholder disagreement on features, blocked design decisions, competing values in a product, balancing business vs. user values, or when someone says "we can't agree on what to build because everyone has different values." Also trigger for "Value Dams and Flows", "value trade-offs", "stakeholder values", "blocked features", or "competing values".

Use when a designer, team lead, or design manager wants to open up values discussions in a team, identify what values are currently embedded in team practices, use constraints creatively to surface value conflicts, advocate for ethical considerations within an organization, facilitate cross-disciplinary values alignment, or understand what values their communication systems are reinforcing. Apply the Values Levers framework to surface, discuss, and build team consensus around values embedded in a design process or organizational culture. Trigger this skill for any mention of team values alignment, values in design practice, organizational culture and ethics, building consensus on ethics, soft resistance in design, advocating for ethical design internally, or when someone says "I'm trying to get my team to care about ethics." Also trigger for "Values Levers", "team values", "org ethics culture", "building consensus", "soft resistance", or "advocating for ethical design".

Use when a designer, product team, or researcher wants to proactively identify risks in a design before shipping, generate worry clusters around a product idea, reframe concerns as design values, map unintended consequences, or run an ethical pre-mortem on a feature or product. Facilitate a Worrystorming session to surface ethical concerns, unintended consequences, and value failures in a design or product. Trigger this skill for any mention of ethical risks, design worries, what could go wrong, unintended consequences, pre-mortem, concern mapping, value conflicts in design, or when someone says "I'm worried this design might..." Also trigger for "worrystorming", "ethical pre-mortem", "what could go wrong", "concern mapping", "risk brainstorm", or "value conflicts".