Post #1991410

2026-04-21 06:00 UTC

@johannab @smallcircles "victims" is not a great word but it's clearer than "indirect stakeholders" or some other bloodless term for people don't directly use the system _with agency_ but are otherwise affected by the system's results. I'm thinking of this in an engineering context - what if our safety analysis software doesn't work correctly and the results lead designers or regulators to make bad engineering decisions which lead to bad outcomes for workers and the public. Economically and politically, the misguided austerity policy decisions justified by the flawed Reinhart-Rogoff model (Excel) no doubt killed people in the UK, though to be fair the austerity policy would likely have been instituted regardless of the conclusions of Growth in a Time of Debt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt (i.e. starving pensioners was a policy feature, not a bug.). And I don't doubt you could find another 6 examples from med tech before you finished breakfast (bad UIs for pharmacy dispensing have killed people). "unacknowledged stakeholders" is very close to the term I'm looking for, it just has 4-5 more syllables than I want. And yeah, once you start thinking about this group of people subject to software risk, you start seeing them everywhere. Really a "THEY LIVE" turning point in outlook.

Replies (1)

@smallcircles@social.coop 2026-04-21 06:18

@arclight @johannab > "victims" is not a great word but it's clearer than "indirect stakeholders" or some other bloodless term for people don't directly use the system _with agency_ but are otherwise affected by the system's results. Totally agree with you. "Affected" might be a better word. Other than that, when looking at #SX methodology specifically, in a holistic approach multiple things must come together: 0. Center. Knowing where to go. Desire. 1. Think. An underpinning philosophy. 2. Act. A formal design approach. 3. Feel. A translation to real-world practice. In the last bit, bullet 3) the formal design language in 2) has a concept of Storytelling. If you explain to a government institution that it is vital to subsidize fediverse development, to ensure ecosystem health and growth, you use different storytelling for that audience, than when you rally the grassroots forces for a multi-disciplinary hackathon for all fedizens to participate in.

Open ##1991411