Graham Powell-Wood
← Work · 03 / 14

Ethics in Design

A field guide to harmful patterns in AI-era products.

Type
Not-for-profit
Year
2026
Role
Editor and designer
Status
In development
The Ethics in Design cover: the wordmark with ‘in’ in red italic, beside a grid of squares and dots.
The identity: a grotesk for the system’s voice, a red italic for the human one.
The work

I bought the domain years ago to write about dark patterns. AI has made the subject more urgent: sycophancy loops, rubber-stamp oversight, agents that nudge on someone else’s behalf, decisions that ship without anyone owning them.

Ethics in Design is a field guide to systems that talk and act for people. Each pattern gets a common name, a gloss and a code, and a glyph that shows what goes wrong and how to design it out. The point is to let teams argue about specific things rather than about ethics in general.

I edit it, and designed its identity: a grotesk for the system’s voice, an italic serif for the human one, and a glyph set in which only people are solid.

Three pattern tiles: Sycophancy loop, Rubber-stamp oversight and Unowned decision, each with its glyph and code.
Pattern tiles: a common name, an italic gloss and a code, the way a field guide names a species.
NextAgentic HR for hospitality →