BLIP: Facilitating the Exploration of Undesirable Consequences of Digital Technologies

TL;DR

BLIP is a system that extracts, summarizes, and categorizes undesirable consequences of digital technologies from online articles, helping researchers identify potential adverse effects they might not have considered before.

Contribution

This paper introduces BLIP, a novel system that leverages online articles to help researchers explore and understand undesirable consequences of digital technologies.

Findings

BLIP increased the number and diversity of consequences researchers could identify.

It helped researchers find consequences relevant to their projects.

It inspired reflection on personal experiences with technology.

Abstract

Digital technologies have positively transformed society, but they have also led to undesirable consequences not anticipated at the time of design or development. We posit that insights into past undesirable consequences can help researchers and practitioners gain awareness and anticipate potential adverse effects. To test this assumption, we introduce BLIP, a system that extracts real-world undesirable consequences of technology from online articles, summarizes and categorizes them, and presents them in an interactive, web-based interface. In two user studies with 15 researchers in various computer science disciplines, we found that BLIP substantially increased the number and diversity of undesirable consequences they could list in comparison to relying on prior knowledge or searching online. Moreover, BLIP helped them identify undesirable consequences relevant to their ongoing projects, made them aware of undesirable consequences they "had never considered," and inspired them to reflect on their own experiences with technology.