Catalogued under: Psychology · Language · Technology · Ethics
DODOO
DARLING
(more formally known as Stephanie Orkuma)
Understanding people and designing systems that help them thrive.
AI UX Strategist, Designer, Researcher, Writer, and Builder working at the intersection of psychology, language, technology, ethics, and human flourishing.
Fig. 1 — St Peter's Basilica, Vatican.
Silver-print scan, photographer unknown.
The Card Catalogue
Four Drawers, One Question
Every field in this archive returns to the same inquiry: what helps people thrive?
Drawer 01 / D–UX
UX Design
Designing human-centered products, services, and experiences.
View UX Work →Drawer 02 / D–AI
AI Ethics
Exploring the ethical, social, and human implications of artificial intelligence.
Read AI Ethics Work →Drawer 03 / D–PSY
Psychology
Understanding human behavior, well-being, and flourishing.
Explore Psychology →Drawer 04 / D–LNG
Language
Examining communication, meaning, linguistics, and human expression.
Explore Language →From the Stacks
Featured Writings
Recently filed clippings — essays, field notes, and working papers.
The Ethics of Designing for Vulnerability: What AI Gets Wrong About Human Wellbeing
Most AI tools optimise for engagement metrics poorly aligned with psychological health. This essay examines what a genuinely wellbeing-centred design process would demand — and why it is harder than it appears.
Cognitive Load and the Quiet Harm of Poorly Designed Interfaces
On the cumulative psychological cost of friction, choice overload, and systems that treat attention as an infinite resource.
How the Words We Use in AI Shape the Minds That Use It
Framing effects in conversational AI — and why the vocabulary of machine learning is never neutral.
Against Wellness: Why Mental Health Apps Often Miss What Women Actually Need
A critical look at the assumptions embedded in the most popular wellbeing platforms.
Aristotle's Eudaimonia and the Question of Digital Flourishing
What ancient philosophy can still teach us about designing systems for a good life.
Current Exhibits
Featured Projects
Selected works currently on display from the permanent collection.
Uwam
A culturally grounded women's mental health and wellbeing initiative — psychology-informed design meeting community-based care.
View in Psychology Wing →AI Interaction Design Research
Studying how people form mental models of AI systems — and how those models shape trust, reliance, and dependency.
View in UX Wing →Emerging Technologists Programme
Mentorship and capacity-building for early-career technologists from underrepresented backgrounds.
View Full Collection →Correspondence
Write to the Archive
Collaborations, conversations, and considered questions welcome.
From
Dodoo Darling — Field Office
I welcome conversations with researchers, practitioners, institutions, and individuals working at the intersections of psychology, technology, design, and human wellbeing.
If you are building something that takes people seriously — I would like to hear from you.
Archive / Personal File — 002
Who Keeps This Archive
About Dodoo
A practitioner's file: background, disciplines, and current preoccupations.
Dodoo Darling (Stephanie Orkuma) works at the intersection of people, systems, and meaning. With a background spanning Languages & Linguistics, User Experience, Artificial Intelligence, and Psychology, she asks the kinds of questions most practitioners overlook: not just how systems work, but why people engage with them — and at what cost.
Her path began in language. A degree in Languages & Linguistics trained her to see communication as structure, culture, and cognition all at once — a lens she has carried into every field since. From there she moved into UX design and research, and then into AI, where the questions of meaning and interpretation she first met in linguistics reappeared at the scale of entire systems.
Today her practice spans AI UX strategy, design, and research, with postgraduate studies in psychology in view — a deliberate next step toward the scientific foundations of the questions her work keeps raising. She designs AI-assisted tools that center psychological depth, attending not only to usability but to emotional resonance, ethical weight, and long-term wellbeing.
Beyond her design practice, Dodoo researches and writes about women's mental health, feminist approaches to technology, psycholinguistics, and the philosophy of flourishing. She approaches each domain as practitioner, researcher, and builder — making things while questioning the premises on which they are built. Her mission, across every field in this archive, is singular: to understand people deeply enough to design systems that help them thrive.
Archivist at her desk —
scan from a personal album.
The Course of Study
B.A. Languages & Linguistics
Phonology, semantics, sociolinguistics — the architecture of human meaning.
UX & AI Career
AI UX strategy, product design, and research across human-centered systems.
Postgraduate Psychology
Formal training toward research in wellbeing, behaviour, and flourishing.
Research Interests
Human flourishing · psycholinguistics · AI ethics · human-centered AI · feminist perspectives on technology · language & cognition · behaviour change.
Mission
To understand people — their language, minds, and contexts — deeply enough to design technology and institutions that help them flourish, with particular care for women's mental health and communities the industry overlooks.
Currently
Building Uwam · researching AI interaction · mentoring emerging technologists · writing at the intersections that matter.
Archive / Drawer 01 — UX Design
Drawer 01 / The Design Room
UX Design
Philosophy — Design is applied empathy with consequences. I design human-centered products, services, and experiences that begin from how people actually think, feel, and cope — not from how we wish they behaved. Good UX reduces the quiet harms of friction and confusion; great UX leaves people more capable than it found them.
Work Experience — A Timeline
AI UX Strategist Full-time
Northwind DigitalLeading interaction strategy for AI-assisted products — defining how intelligent systems should explain themselves, earn trust, and respect users' cognitive and emotional limits.
Product / UX Designer Full-time
Lumora HealthEnd-to-end design across research, flows, prototyping, and usability testing for digital products, with a focus on clarity, accessibility, and emotionally honest interfaces.
UX Researcher Contract
Studio HalcyonQualitative and mixed-method research — interviews, diary studies, and usability evaluation — translating human insight into design direction teams can act on.
Junior Designer, Linguistics-to-Design Transition Full-time
Verba CollectiveBegan in Languages & Linguistics, where studying how meaning is structured became the foundation for designing how meaning is experienced.
Featured Projects & Case Studies
Conversational AI Onboarding Redesign
Reworked first-contact experience for an AI assistant: set honest expectations of capability, surfaced limitations early, and reduced abandonment by replacing marketing language with calibrated trust cues.
Wellbeing Check-in Flow, Reimagined
Replaced a clinical, form-heavy mood tracker with a gentler conversational pattern grounded in psychology — improving completion while refusing dark-pattern streak mechanics.
UX Articles & Essays
Skills & Tools
↜ tools change; the questions stay the same
Archive / Drawer 02 — AI Ethics
Drawer 02 / The Ethics Reading Room
AI Ethics
Philosophy — Every AI system is a set of values wearing an interface. I study the ethical, social, and human implications of artificial intelligence: who benefits, who bears the costs, and how design decisions quietly become moral ones. The goal is not to slow technology down, but to make it answerable to the people it acts upon.
Research & Writings
The Ethics of Designing for Vulnerability
What AI gets wrong about human wellbeing — and what a genuinely wellbeing-centred design process would demand of teams, metrics, and incentives.
Trust Is Earned in Interfaces, Not in Whitepapers
Why responsible AI lives or dies at the level of interaction design — consent moments, explanations, and graceful refusals.
Whose Wellbeing? Gendered Assumptions in AI Mental-Health Tools
A feminist reading of how "support" is defined, measured, and automated.
The Dependency Question: When Helpful Systems Make Us Less Capable
On reliance, de-skilling, and designing AI that strengthens rather than substitutes human judgment.
Projects in This Drawer
AI Interaction Ethics Audit Framework
A practical instrument for product teams: a structured review of consent, explanation, refusal behaviour, and psychological safety in AI interfaces — turning principles into checkable design decisions.
Ethics Reading Circle & Public Salons
A recurring discussion forum bringing designers, researchers, and community members together around AI ethics texts — building shared literacy outside institutions that usually gatekeep the conversation.
Relevant Work & Volunteer Experience
AI UX Strategist — Ethics in Practice Full-time
Northwind DigitalEmbedding ethical review into everyday product decisions: model behaviour specs, refusal design, and harm-aware research protocols.
Facilitator, AI Literacy Workshops Volunteer
Tech Equity CollectiveFacilitating community sessions that demystify AI for non-technical audiences, with emphasis on rights, risks, and agency.
Mentor — Women in Responsible Tech Volunteer
Women in Responsible Tech NetworkSupporting early-career women entering AI and design with guidance on navigating ethics questions in real workplaces.
Research Interests
Human-Centered AI
Methods that keep AI accountable to human needs, agency, and dignity.
Feminist Perspectives on Technology
Whose experience is treated as default — and what design owes everyone else.
Psychological Safety in AI Interaction
Trust calibration, dependency, and the emotional contracts interfaces make.
Archive / Drawer 03 — Psychology
Drawer 03 / The Study of Minds
Psychology
Interests & goals — I am drawn to the psychology of wellbeing, behaviour, and human flourishing: why people struggle, what helps them recover, and how environments — including digital ones — shape both. My goal is to pair practice with formal research training, with postgraduate studies in psychology in view, and to focus that training on women's mental health.
Women's Mental Health Initiative
Uwam
A culturally grounded mental health and wellbeing initiative designed for African women. Uwam integrates psychology-informed design, community-based care models, and AI assistance to offer support that resonates with lived experience — rather than importing clinical frameworks that were never built for us.
Psychology Writings & Essays
Cognitive Load and the Quiet Harm of Poorly Designed Interfaces
No. 02Against Wellness: Why Mental Health Apps Often Miss What Women Actually Need
No. 03Flourishing Is Not a Feature: Psychology Beyond the Engagement Metric
No. 04What Behaviour Change Research Actually Says About Habit Apps
The Road Ahead
Postgraduate Degree — In View
Formal psychology training to ground practice in research methods, with a focus on wellbeing science and women's mental health.
Human Flourishing Research
Studying the conditions — psychological, social, and designed — under which people genuinely thrive, not merely cope.
Future Projects
Expanding Uwam's research base; developing psychology-informed design guidance for AI products serving vulnerable users.
Archive / Drawer 04 — Language
Drawer 04 / The Philology Desk
Language
Where it all began — My degree in Languages & Linguistics taught me that language is never just words: it is structure, culture, and cognition braided together. That training now shapes how I study communication, meaning, and psycholinguistics — and how I think about machines that claim to "understand" us.
Language Writings
Interests at This Desk
Psycholinguistics
How language is processed, produced, and woven into thought — and what that implies for conversational AI.
Communication & Meaning
Pragmatics, framing, and the everyday negotiation of understanding between people — and between people and machines.
Language & Cognition
The two-way street between the words available to us and the thoughts we can comfortably think.
Language Projects
Conversational Tone Guide for AI Products
A linguistics-grounded voice and tone system for AI assistants — register, hedging, repair strategies, and culturally aware phrasing, treated with the rigour of a style manual.
Multilingual UX Research Notes
An open, growing collection of field notes on designing across languages — translation pitfalls, cultural framing, and what gets lost when products assume English-first minds.
↶ linguistics was the first apprenticeship — everything else is its continuation
Archive / The Stacks — All Writings
The Stacks
Articles
Clippings and working notes, organised by subject heading.
The Ethics of Designing for Vulnerability
What AI gets wrong about human wellbeing — and what wellbeing-centred design would actually demand.
Cognitive Load and the Quiet Harm of Poorly Designed Interfaces
The cumulative psychological cost of friction and choice overload.
How the Words We Use in AI Shape the Minds That Use It
Framing effects in conversational AI — the vocabulary of ML is never neutral.
Designing AI That Knows When to Be Quiet
Restraint as an interaction pattern: notifications, suggestions, and silence.
Against Wellness: Why Mental Health Apps Often Miss What Women Actually Need
The assumptions embedded in popular wellbeing platforms.
Aristotle's Eudaimonia and the Question of Digital Flourishing
Ancient philosophy's lessons for designing systems that support a good life.
Politeness, Power, and Prompts: Sociolinguistics for the Chatbot Age
Register and power dynamics in human–AI conversation.
Empathy Is Not a Deliverable
Rethinking the UX research ritual when insight becomes theatre.
Whose Wellbeing? Gendered Assumptions in AI Mental-Health Tools
A feminist reading of automated "support."
What Multilingual Minds Teach Us About Interface Design
Designing for people who think between languages.
No clippings match your search.
more clippings are filed monthly — the archive is alive ✎
Archive / The Project Hall
The Project Hall
A Cross-Disciplinary Portfolio
Built things, research efforts, and social-impact work — each exhibit labelled by field.
Psychology × Design × Social Impact
Uwam
A culturally grounded mental health and wellbeing initiative for African women — psychology-informed design, community-based care models, and careful AI assistance, built around lived experience.
Conversational AI Onboarding Redesign
Calibrated-trust onboarding for an AI assistant — honest capability framing, early limitation disclosure.
Case study in UX Wing →AI Interaction Ethics Audit Framework
A practical review instrument for consent, explanation, and refusal design in AI products.
Record in Ethics Room →AI Interaction Design Research
Mental models, trust, and dependency in human–AI relationships — interviews, prototypes, studies.
Notes in UX Wing →Emerging Technologists Programme
Capacity-building for early-career technologists from underrepresented backgrounds — human-centred design, ethical thinking, intentional building.
Programme notes →Conversational Tone Guide for AI Products
A linguistics-grounded voice system: register, hedging, repair, and culturally aware phrasing.
Folio in Language Desk →Future Social-Impact Initiatives
In planning: community research partnerships and wellbeing-technology pilots across women's health and education.
Propose a collaboration →Archive / The Map Room — Research Interests
From the Reading Room
Research Papers & Working Drafts
Individual records from the research shelf — each catalogued with its current status.
Designing for Vulnerability: A Framework for Wellbeing-Centred AI
An applied framework arguing that AI products should be evaluated against psychological wellbeing outcomes, not engagement alone — with worked examples from conversational AI design.
Read the Full Paper →Lived Experience as Method: Community-Based Research with Uwam
A field study documenting the design and early outcomes of Uwam's community-based mental health model for African women, with implications for culturally grounded care research.
Draft Not Yet PublicFraming Effects in Conversational AI: A Psycholinguistic Reading
An analysis of how vocabulary choices in AI interfaces shape users' mental models of system capability, drawing on framing theory and applied psycholinguistics.
Read the Full Paper →Toward Accountable Defaults: A Design Audit Method for AI Interaction Ethics
A methodology paper formalising the AI Interaction Ethics Audit Framework into a repeatable instrument for design teams, including scoring rubrics and case applications.
Draft Not Yet PublicWhose Default? Gendered Assumptions in Mental-Health Technology
A literature review and interview study examining how "support," "safety," and "wellbeing" are operationalised in popular mental-health apps — and for whom.
Draft Not Yet PublicBeyond the Streak: What Behaviour-Change Research Says About Habit-Forming Design
A review connecting psychological literature on sustainable behaviour change to common "engagement mechanic" patterns in consumer apps, identifying where the two diverge.
Read the Full Paper →