Eriol Fox

Senior Product Manager & Designer * they/them

Eriol is a ‘generalist’ senior designer with 10+ years of experience in design, technology and human rights and has been leading projects and teams for the last 5. Their bachelor’s degree was in Time-based media, where they explored the nature of communicating digitally, personal information exchange and vulnerability in the early 2000s. They then pivoted into a design career while doing volunteer community work in Cardiff UK across Environmental, Education, Asylum Seeker and Arts issues and gained their masters in Visual Communication at the University of South Wales. Eriol has worked in insurance, finance, legal, housing and family tech sectors before moving into the open-source and human rights as a designer. They are most happy when working as part of a team of designers, developers and product folks with a focus on collaboration and cross-function conversation and appreciation.

They are passionate about intersectional inclusion and actively works to make tech and design more inclusive through their talk ‘Diversity in Design’ and also ensuring design is ’trauma informed’ through their talk ‘UX research and Ethnographic design for humanitarian technology’. Eriol is also part of a number of communities including Open Source Design, Sustain OSS Design & UX Working group and their local Pride festival committee.

Eriol is currently studying part-time for a PhD in Computer Science at Newcastle University’s Open Lab the research is funded by Northern Bridge and is around how designers get involved in humanitarian focused open source software projects.

To schedule a coaching session with Eriol Fox please send an email to [email protected].

eriol's recent work

Co-designing Platform Policy For "High Risk" Content Creators: The Tech Policy Design Lab Approach

A Tech Policy Design Playbook was developed and published as the culmination of our work with the World Wide Web Foundation and 3x3 on Deceptive Design, and includes guidance on how to run community co-design engagements around tech policy design. Superbloom, in partnership with Dr Carolina Are, facilitated three community sessions around the risks to “high risk” content creators and being de-platformed from essential social and content platforms.

On Being a Coach: Support for Designers in Privacy and Security Open Source Software

In December 2022, Superbloom partnered with Internews and Okthanks to create resources that help open source software (OSS) teams better understand how design processes and user-centered activities improve usability, and therefore the security of open source tools. After publishing these resources and speaking about them to the wider OSS community, we found that designers and developers working in privacy and security OSS tool teams wanted to explore specific challenges through conversations with us. This led to the final component of the Adoptable project in the form of coaching.

Feira 2023: Reflecting, Reconnecting, and Revitalizing

In September 2023, we were able to participate in Feira, the Global Gathering, a festival for digital rights defenders, convened by Team Community. The Feira was a three day social and networking festival hosted in Estoril, Portugal on September 15 - 17, 2023. The event, designed, modeled and named for the concept of a community market, was created to provide digital rights defenders with a space to connect with others in the digital rights community for informal meetups, discussions, and joy — particularly as this was the first time gathering in-person for most participants since before the start of the COVID19 pandemic.