This workshop will be held as part of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2026 which will be held 13-17 April 2026 in Barcelona.

The workshop will be held Wednesday, 15 April (in two sessions 2:15-3:45pm and 4:30-6pm).

In this workshop we seek to better understand what we believe to be an under-valued area of AI Ethics: front-end design.  Much ethics discourse revolves around the design of back-end systems, but the design of what users experience at the ‘front-end’ entails many values-laden decisions too. For example, “dark” patterns, distorted data visualization, participation-washing and exclusionary interfaces all fall within the purview of front-end design. Through cross-disciplinary brainstorming and collaborative activities, we aim to map a landscape of ethical user-facing design for AI including best practices, policy considerations, and pressing areas for future research. The workshop will also host a keynote by Professor Ben Shneiderman.

Workshop Proposal Paper in CHI Proceedings:

Peters, D., Hollanek, T., Ahmadpour, N., Calvo, R. A., Chivukula, S. S., Dindler, C., Gray, C. M., Lazem, S., Öz, G., & Piet, N. (2026). Ethics at the Front-End: Responsible User-Facing Design for AI Systems. CHI EA ’26 Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2026.

Workshop Papers

• Interpretative Interfaces: Reframing AI Interpretability as Interface Design
  Gabrielle Benabdallah, University of Washington

• Why We Need to Destroy the Illusion of Speaking to A Human: Critical Reflections On Ethics at the Front-End for LLMs
  Sarah Diefenbach and Daniel Ullrich, LMU Munich

• AI interfaces across the lifespan
  Elena Falco, and Urvashi Sharma, Version 1 Ltd

• PII Shield: A Browser-Level Overlay for User-Controlled Personal Identifiable Information (PII) Management in AI Interactions
  Maximilian Holschneider and Saetbyeol LeeYouk, MIT Media Lab

• Thrill or Transparency? Openness about the Limitations of AI-based Systems
  Daniel Kolb, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Germany

• Front-End Ethics for Sensor-Fused Health Conversational Agents: An Ethical Design Space for Biometrics
  Hansoo Lee, Imperial College London and Korea Institute of Science and Technology
  Rafael A. Calvo, Imperial College London

• The Imbalanced User-AI Relationships as an Ethical Failure of Front-End Design in Healthcare AI
  Maureen Mghambi Mwadime, Northumbria University

• Designing for Disagreement: Front-End Guardrails for Assistance Allocation in LLM-Enabled Robots
  Carmen Ng, Technical University of Munich

• Designing AI for Real Users: Accessibility Gaps in Retail AI Front-Ends
  Neha Puri and Tim Dixon, Intertek Group Plc

• Resisting Humanization: Ethical Front-End Design Choices in Conversational AI for Sensitive Contexts
  Silvia Rossi, Immanence
  Diletta Huyskes, University of Milan, Immanence
  Mackenzie Jorgensen, Northumbria University and Immanence

• Scaffolding Scholarly Judgement: A case study in front-end design for AI in EdTech
  Christina Spencer and Diba Kaya, ITHAKA | JSTOR

• Minimal Effort, Maximum Impact: Fighting Humanoids and Interface Design
  Joel Wester, University of Copenhagen,
  Eike Schneiders, University of Southampton,
  Jacy Reese Anthis, University of Chicago

• Strategies for Designing Responsibly within a Capitalist Enterprise
  Shixian Xie, Motahhare Eslami and John Zimmerman, Carnegie Mellon University

Schedule

SESSION 1 

2:15-2:25pm - Welcome  (Dorian Peters)

2:25-3:15pm - Lightening Talks (everyone)

3:15-3:45pm - Keynote by Ben Shneiderman

——————— BREAK (3:45-4:30pm) ————————

SESSION 2

4:30-5:10pm - Unpacking front-end design for Research, Policy, and Practice (Rafael Calvo, Tom Hollanek, Dorian Peters)
Participants choose one of three groups: Research, Policy or Practice. Each group generates ideas for 3 categories: 1. Strengths/Good practice; 2. Big issues/challenges  3. Needs/Recommendations. 10min individual brainstorm, 30min share and cluster into themes.

5:10-5:45pm - Mapping the landscape (Tom Hollanek)
As a large group, participants share and then cluster findings from the previous activity to create a map of the landscape including where research is needed to inform policy and practice.

5:45-6:00pm - Next Steps to better research and practice (Colin Gray)
As a large group, reflect on key insights/findings from workshop and next steps.