May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA | Rock Yuren Pang, Sebastin Santy, René Just, Katharina Reinecke
The paper introduces Blup, a system designed to help researchers and practitioners identify and understand the undesirable consequences of digital technologies. These consequences, often unforeseen at the time of design or development, can have significant societal impacts. Blup extracts real-world examples from online articles, summarizes and categorizes them, and presents them in an interactive web interface. Two user studies with 15 researchers in various computer science disciplines found that Blup significantly increased the number and diversity of undesirable consequences identified compared to relying on prior knowledge or online searches. Participants also reported that Blup helped them identify consequences relevant to their ongoing projects and inspired them to reflect on their own experiences with technology. The paper contributes empirical evidence that a catalog of undesirable consequences supports researchers in considering more and more diverse consequences and provides an open-source, web-based system, BlIP, for collecting, summarizing, and categorizing these consequences.The paper introduces Blup, a system designed to help researchers and practitioners identify and understand the undesirable consequences of digital technologies. These consequences, often unforeseen at the time of design or development, can have significant societal impacts. Blup extracts real-world examples from online articles, summarizes and categorizes them, and presents them in an interactive web interface. Two user studies with 15 researchers in various computer science disciplines found that Blup significantly increased the number and diversity of undesirable consequences identified compared to relying on prior knowledge or online searches. Participants also reported that Blup helped them identify consequences relevant to their ongoing projects and inspired them to reflect on their own experiences with technology. The paper contributes empirical evidence that a catalog of undesirable consequences supports researchers in considering more and more diverse consequences and provides an open-source, web-based system, BlIP, for collecting, summarizing, and categorizing these consequences.