About this guide
A field guide to harm in systems that talk and act for people, edited in public by someone who builds them.
What this is
Ethics in Design is a field guide to patterns of harm in products that talk to people and act for them. Each entry names a pattern, explains how it works, lists the signs that it is present and shows how to design it out. The guide is arranged in three territories: Relational, systems that talk; Delegated, systems that act; and Process, how design is made. Every pattern has a code that never changes (R.01, D.03, P.02), so a citation stays good if a name is revised.
Each pattern also has a glyph, drawn in one small grammar. A solid dot is a person, and the only solid thing. An open square is a system, whether it talks or acts; a smaller square is something a system works on, such as an option or an outcome. Lines carry the relationships: a line from a person says whose system it is, an arrow that it acts, arcs that it talks. A ring is an imitation of a person; a dashed ring is a person who should be there and is not. A long rule is a surface, with hidden things below it. Every glyph has two states: observed, with the harm in red, and designed out, all in ink.
The guide also sets out its argument in Position 1, and turns the patterns into twelve questions in the Review.
Editor
Graham Powell-Wood is a designer and founder who builds AI-native companies. A founding member of Deloitte Digital and former creative director at Somo and CI&T, he co-founded Alternative Company, home to AltCo, Laid & Wove and Cartogra. He has worked in design for fifteen-plus years and is based in London.
Interests
I build the kind of systems this guide examines, and I earn my living doing it. I co-founded Alternative Company. Its businesses are AltCo, which designs and builds AI systems for organisations; Laid & Wove, a publisher run on agents; and Cartogra, a coordination layer for people’s agents, which puts it squarely in the guide’s Delegated territory.
Field notes in this guide come from that work, anonymised. Where a pattern is one we have built, the entry says so. The guide is not-for-profit and carries no advertising, and no one pays to be included or left out.
Method
A pattern earns a name when three things hold: it has been seen in more than one product, its mechanism can be described, and there is a designed-out alternative that works. Entries are marked draft while the evidence is still being gathered, review while they are open for comment, and stable once they have met the standard and survived review.
Every factual claim links to a source we have read: research, regulator guidance, law or reporting. We say when research is a preprint, when a sample is small, and when a finding shows association rather than cause. We do not invent examples, quotes or statistics. Field notes come from the editor’s own practice, anonymised, and are marked as such.
Every entry carries a revision number and a dated changelog, and the changelog lists every change across the guide. Codes never change; names can, and old addresses redirect. Corrections are made in public.
We use AI tools for research and drafting. Every claim is checked against its source, and every entry is edited and approved by the editor, who answers for it.
Licence and citation
Text and glyphs are published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may copy, adapt and use them, commercially or not, as long as you credit the guide. Each entry gives its own citation, in this form:
Colophon
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