Trust 8 (TR-8) Card

Card Details - Eight of Trust

Abbreviation

TR-8

Card's focus

The focus of this card is false accusations

Threat to claimants

Ava wrongly flags factually correct data input by claimants as suspicious, casting doubt on claimants' honesty and diligence

Threat to claimants

Ava wrongly flags factually correct data input by claimants as suspicious, casting doubt on claimants' honesty and diligence.

Some examples of how this threat could lead to harms (negative effects on claimants)

The design recommendations and implications relevant to the card are listed below in the next section, but even those can be somewhat abstract and difficult to think about during practical day-to-day implementation. Therefore, some example harms are provided to complement the more formal research outputs. These examples are unique per card, and are only published on these web pages (i.e. in no other project outputs).

When claimants are falsely condemned of contravening rules or commitments, they feel belittled and they lose confidence, which has a knock-on adverse effect on their employability
Biases in software undermine relationships between government officials and claimants, leaving claimants left to do extra work to counter invalid assumptions and incorrect conclusions
The manner of questions denigrate claimants who feel they are constantly being unnecessarily probed about their circumstances and who they really are, as if they are lying

The examples are to help understand the threat on the card, not to suppress thinking and innovation. Incorporating these examples exactly, or closely matching ones, should be scored down when playing DBD Cornucopia as a game.

Applicable design recommendations and implications

These are reproduced here from Research Briefing NO2. Multiple cards reference each design implication.

Acknowledge claimants as people in digital design

Prioritise claimants' interests over system efficiencies
All digital welfare design processes, methods and decision-making should prioritise claimants' needs to achieve best outcomes for individuals rather than system efficiencies. Organisational knowledge and resources should be utilised to this respect including intervening in advance to identify matters that affect claims or what claimants may have forgotten about.
Ensure system and state accountability to claimants
Equalise accountability between claimants and the state. Promote a sense of fairness by enforcing an expectation that service level standards for actions and response times should be similar to those expected of claimants, with related penalties not disproportionately, or only, affecting claimants. Provide tools/methods for claimants to easily check, query and challenge actions and decisions.

Design systems which support the division of labour with claimants' ecosystems

Recognise changing trust effects in design of digital systems
Claimants have different opinions about the trustworthiness and motivations of the state, unfamiliar claimants and other actors, which affect their tolerance to accept harms, requiring flexibility in choosing assistance and recognition how this trust can change over time: prior to making a claim, while maintaining a claim, and after ceasing to be a claimant.

General Notes

Card values (i.e. '8' for this card) are for game play and are not correlated with the severity of harm. This is because threats cannot be ranked directly since they can affect individuals in different ways due to situations and circumstances, or affect fewer or more claimants, or the harms can arise in claimants' support networks and wider society.

The threat description uses a person's name as the "attacker" (i.e. 'Ava' for this card), which can be thought of someone involved with implementation. They could have any role which influence digitisation. So they could be a database administrator, or a copy writer, or a quality assurance specialist, etc, or all of these. Everyone could have some influence on the claimant threat described. The names were randomly selected from those currently most popular as given names for boys and girls (UK Office for National Statistics).

The example harms provided are drawn from the research data (which explored not only parts of existing services but also the effects of possible changes to those), from the author's own knowledge of web application development and testing, the author's own experience of helping citizens to claim Universal Credit (UC) and Personal Independence Payment (PIP), and from suggestions submitted by other people (make a suggestion). The threats and example harms do not necessarily exist in the current UC or PIP deployments or in ecosystems around those services, but they might well do.

All the cards in this Trust suit are: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 J Q K A

The other suits in the deck are: Scope, Architecture, Agency, Porosity and Cornucopia (plus Jokers).