A field guide to systemic effects, hidden logics, and institutional erosion in mediated life.
Consequence Design is a framework for examining how technology affects real lives post-deployment. It focuses on the tangible impacts of platforms and tools—the harm they produce once released into the world and how those harms ripple through communities and systems.
This isn't about theoretical ethics or design aesthetics. It's about concrete mechanisms: how defaults, automation decisions, and system architectures create real-world consequences that their creators often don't see or acknowledge. It examines what happens after technology leaves the controlled environment of development.
Consequence Design builds from observed reality—the administrative burdens, technical debris, and institutional damage people must navigate when systems fail slowly and responsibility is diffused or denied.
Consequence Design emerged from a need to better respond to the real harms technology inflicts on everyday life. It developed as I witnessed how platforms and systems operate without sufficient consideration for the people who use them and the communities they affect.
This framework provides both a language for naming these challenges and a methodology for addressing them. It moves beyond surface-level critiques of "ethical lapses" to examine the structural and operational choices that create harm by design, regardless of intention.
What distinguishes Consequence Design from other frameworks is its focus on implementation and deployment rather than just interface design. It's less concerned with pixels and more with how technologies behave in complex social environments.
DIRE is the applied systems framework that emerged from Consequence Design. It focuses on how to maintain and repair complex systems under pressure—especially when they are fragmented, aging, or layered with conflicting incentives.
DIRE centers on two concepts: integrity and reliability. It helps teams identify where systems drift from what they claim to be doing, and what happens when reliability fails across time, scale, or context.
It is used by designers, product leaders, operations teams, and public sector institutions to track breakdowns, map failure patterns, and develop realistic maintenance strategies.
You can learn more about DIRE below.
A practical framework for maintaining, improving, and stabilizing complex sociotechnical systems. Focused on repair, resilience, and institutional fluency.
What holds the system together when no one’s watching.