Designing for Trust-Avoiding the Creepiness Factor with Human-Centered Privacy

In an era where hyper-personalization is the norm, companies and systems face the challenge of balancing user convenience with privacy concerns. When designs cross into “creepy” territory, where users feel uncomfortably monitored or manipulated, trust and engagement can quickly erode. This session explores real-world case studies that highlight the risks of over-customization and examines how Human-Centered Design can provide a framework for understanding user needs, establishing clear privacy principles and designing experiences that build trust rather than discomfort. Attendees will gain actionable insights into using Human-Centered-Design to prioritize transparency, user control, and ethical data practices, ensuring designs are innovative but never invasive.  

Rachel Switzky is the inaugural director of the Siebel Center for Design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a position she has held since 2018. The Siebel Center for Design is dedicated to practicing, modeling, and teaching design thinking, leveraging human-centered design principles to reimagine the campus, community and the world at large. She also leads the education and outreach work at the Molecule Maker Lab Institute–an NSF-funded AI Institute based at the University of Illinois. 

Before her current role, Rachel spent more than two decades as a global design leader, collaborating with Fortune 100 companies. Most recently, she served as an executive director at IDEO, the company that pioneered the concept of design thinking. Throughout the last decade in this capacity, Rachel aided teams in envisioning futures and translating those visions into tangible actions, with a particular emphasis on digital design, emerging technologies and achieving impact at scale.