Meet Research Fellow Caroline Sinders
A get to know you series introducing the digital HKS fellows
digital HKS is an initiative at Harvard Kennedy School committed to teaching public leaders how to understand the relationship between technology, data, and the public interest by teaching public leaders to understand how to design, build, and engage with digital technologies as they relate to civic participation, digital equity and inclusion, governance of government platforms, and accountability. The visiting research fellowship provides a space for thinkers and doers in the sphere of digital technology to explore ideas through research and engagement with the Harvard community at-large.
Caroline Sinders
Caroline Sinders is a machine learning designer/user researcher, artist, and digital anthropologist. For her work, Sinders is researching ‘trust patterns’ in communication software including tools like social networks and messaging apps to understand if and when design patterns cause users to trust potentially insecure systems. This includes assessing User Experience Design (UX) and User Interface Design (UI).
How do you hope your work will impact the world?
In her experience, Sinders has seen a lack of discussion around design in regards to user needs. How users experience and interact with design is important because it is the layer that users interact with the most.
“In policy, platform accountability research, information security, and technology, design is important but, in my perspective, historically has been left out of the conversation. Design is the thing that can distill policy and technology into understandable interfaces. Design can facilitate trust, or create dark patterns,” Sinders said.
“Over the past handful of years, I’ve noticed design finally starting to be included in conversations, particularly around activism, and technology. But, I’d like to see design research and the design choices of UX, UI be more included in technology, tech and policy research and sociology, especially when focused on platforms.”
Although Sinders is looking at design choices through a broad scope, her project focuses primarily on journalists as a use case.
Sinders explains, “…journalists are the one user group to face every form of online harassment from doxxing, domestic violence, to state-level adversarial threats. How journalists use communication apps, how their sources use it, how the newsroom is involved, and how journalists are treated within these platforms and apps is incredibly important and crucial research.
Why is Sinders’s work so important? Most of the research being conducted around design is being done in-house. By conducting her research with digital HKS, Sinders can give more power to users in how they interact with design by putting it in the hands of users and designers rather than the platforms behind the designs.
“…if Twitter has done any exploring on the kinds of harassment journalists face, from different countries and regions, a lot of that research stays inside of Twitter. So, I find it imperative to do this kind of research in a space like HKS, and publicly publish what we learn.”
Do you have any book recommendations that relate to technology?
For her research, Sinders finds herself turning more often to long form articles and research reports than to books. These articles include:
- The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators by Whitney Phillips
- Deceived by Design by the Forbrukerradet group
Learn more about Sinders’s work:
You can find out more about Sinders and her work by visiting her website, subscribing to her newsletter or following her on twitter @carolinesinders.
