Purpose
As digital systems increasingly shape public life, economic opportunity, and access to information, concerns around deceptive design and user manipulation have intensified. While conversations around digital ethics were growing globally, there was a critical gap between principles and enforceable governance mechanisms. Through dialogue, our team developed a set of new norms and recommendations to promote trust and limit deceptive practices using a rights-respecting framework. 3×3 partnered with Superbloom and the Web Foundation to move beyond ethical aspiration toward operational governance. The purpose of this initiative was to co-create a framework for Trusted Design that could translate values into standards, regulatory pathways, and accountability systems. The goal was to design infrastructure capable of supporting institutional change across contexts. This work laid foundational models for governing emerging technologies through distributed oversight, cross-sector collaboration, and enforceable accountability mechanisms.
Community-centered approach
3×3 grounded this work in a community-centered governance model. Instead of positioning trust as a technical challenge to be solved by industry alone, we framed it as a civic question requiring participation from those affected by digital systems.
Participation was structured to move from insight to architecture. Early sessions surfaced patterns of harm and gaps in accountability. Subsequent engagements focused on translating those insights into tangible governance components.
Participation
Over 120 global stakeholders engaged through five multidisciplinary design workshops, interviews, and iterative feedback sessions. Participants included digital rights advocates, UX/UI designers, policy and regulatory experts, civil society leaders, technologists and product builders, and international network representatives.
Impact
Conversations on ethics and design helped forge new tools and frameworks to guide those who regulate and build products online towards a web that adheres to Trusted Design. The initiative resulted in a multi-layered governance ecosystem designed to promote trust and limit deceptive practices:
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Trusted Design Norms, working framework that provides industry guidance and benchmarks on UX/UI. A set of standards, principles, and guidelines that establish shared definitions to promote trust and limit deceptive practices using a rights-respecting framework
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Coalition and International Regulatory Task Force that will lay the groundwork for an International Regulatory Task Force to popularize and support the application of regulatory mechanisms across contexts.
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Evaluation & Accreditation System to serve as a basis for regulation while driving additional guidance and accountability for technology companies.
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Crowdsourced Reporting Tool to make deceptive patterns more identifiable, reportable, and trackable.
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Public Awareness Storytelling Campaign to generate greater awareness about the harmful impacts of Deceptive Design, support continued evidence collection, and build demand for action in the form of meaningful industry practices and regulation reforms.
The governance architecture developed through this work offers a transferable model for emerging AI systems, demonstrating how community-centered design can move from ethical discourse to enforceable infrastructure.
