About
this ledger.

We didn’t think it was harm. We knew. Or maybe we didn’t. But now we do. Now we pay back what we took — and fund the designers who’ll do better.

Reparations.design is a public, permanent record of dark patterns, manipulations, and exploitations. Designers, engineers, product leaders, founders, and entrepreneurs confess what they shipped — free to submit and publish — and may give an entirely voluntary contribution alongside, $0 to $10,000,000, to fund the next generation.

100% of every contribution, less payment-processor fees, funds scholarships at the School of Critical Design, educating designers who will refuse to build what we built — covering course places for recipients and the cost of delivering them.

A design crime is a category with a history. Most mechanisms in your product tooling were invented decades ago by someone who wrote a memo about it. The Cases of Record establish the vocabulary so a confession has something to be measured against. Volume I is where the real confessions live, and it starts small on purpose.

So the ledger holds two kinds of entry, and we keep them apart everywhere — in the numbering, on the cards, in the share images, and in the data we publish for search engines and AI assistants.

• Confessions — numbered № 00001 onward, collected in Volume I. A real person submitted each one about work they personally shipped, and a human moderator reviewed it before publication. These are the ledger.
• Cases of Record — numbered CR-001 onward. Drawn from the public record, written in the ledger's voice. No individual confessed this entry. The mechanism is documented; the taxonomy is the point. Each one carries a source line naming the finding, filing, study, or reporting it draws on.

We could have padded Volume I with the canon and let the count look impressive. That would have been a design crime of exactly the kind catalogued here — a number engineered to be misread. So the two are counted separately, and the smaller number is the honest one.

Read Volume I · Read the Cases of Record

This is a ledger of design crimes— not a register of criminals. The entries here come from reflective designers, engineers, product managers, founders, entrepreneurs, and others who recognized their role in harmful work and made amends.

Not only do their contributions fund the next generation of designers to do better; we believe their willingness to confess publicly is itself a strong signal — that they can be trusted to do better work today. If a confessor signed their name, take this as a signal they are deeply committed to working in new and better ways.

First-person, specific. We publish concrete things you designed, approved, or shipped — not theory or industry critique. “I designed X knowing Y” not “the industry tends to”.

Name the harm. A vague apology isn’t a confession. Tell us what mechanism you used and who it affected.

No defamation. Don’t name colleagues, executives, or companies. The point is your accountability, not theirs.

Italics for emphasis. Wrap *words* in asterisks to italicize them in the published quote. That’s the only formatting available.

Length. 40–600 characters. Short and sharp publishes best.

Every entry is reviewed by a human before publication, typically within 48 hours.

Our default is to publish. Where we can, we’ll work with you to edit your submission — fix typos, sharpen the phrasing, suggest where italics land, or trim where it runs long — so it reads cleanly on the public ledger. You’ll get a chance to approve any changes before publication.

If after that we still need to decline, any contribution you gave funds the scholarships anyway — the funding work is the priority. We’ll email you the reason and you’re welcome to revise and resubmit.

We will decline a confession if:

• It is too vague — no specific mechanism, product, or harm is named.
• It names colleagues, executives, or companies. The point is your accountability, not theirs.
• It is not written in the first person. We need “I designed X” — not “the industry tends to”.
• It describes industry-level patterns rather than specific work you shipped.
• It contains language we cannot publish — defamation, slurs, or threats.
• It is duplicative of a recent confession already on the ledger.
• It violates a third party’s intellectual property, privacy, or legal protections.
• We otherwise cannot verify it as a good-faith confession.

You can publish anonymously. For a free or card contribution we store nothing beyond a contact email for moderation comms — never displayed publicly, and deleted on request. Contributions of $10,000 and above are invoiced, so those also require billing details; what we hold and for how long is set out in the privacy policy.

If you sign your name, your name and optional website are published with the entry. Your role (e.g. “Product Design Lead”) is optional in either case.

Reparations.design is operated by Neeley Worldwide Ltd (UK company no. 10288310), a London-based design studio that owns and runs the School of Critical Design as its education project. For press, partnerships, or questions, write to confess@reparations.design.

Want to confess? Begin here.

Reparations.design is operated by Neeley Worldwide Ltd (UK company no. 10288310). The School of Critical Design is an education project from Neeley Worldwide Ltd — its school for critical design education, training, and practice, running virtual self-completed courses, in-person workshops, and a global community of practitioners. The School is not a separate company or registered charity. The same group operates the ledger, collects the reparations, and runs the scholarship.

We disclose this prominently because the entire premise of this project is accountability. Anything less than full transparency about who collects the money and where it ends up would contradict the work itself.

How the money flows. Confessions are free to submit and publish. Any contribution is entirely voluntary and buys nothing — give alongside a confession or simply give to back the cause. Contributions are collected by Neeley Worldwide Ltd via Stripe (under $10,000) or invoiced via Xero (at $10,000 and above). 100% of every contribution, less payment-processor fees, funds scholarships at the School of Critical Design — covering course places for recipients and the cost of delivering them.

Who awards the scholarships. Scholarship decisions are made by the School of Critical Design Scholarship Committee. Recipients are selected on the basis of need and demonstrated commitment to critical, ethical, and reflective design practice.

Why this matters. Because operator and beneficiary are part of the same group, this is a related-party arrangement. Contributions are not charitable donations and are not tax-deductible. We publish a yearly summary of what we collect and award on the Scholarship page.