To say that technologies create unforeseen and unintended harms is an unhelpful truism. But even if we agree with Flusser (2013: 59) that the artefacts we design inevitably ‘throw obstacles in other people's way’, it is still worth interrogating not only the nature of these obstacles, but also how they come to pass. There is a difference between failing to consider pernicious uses of a technology (à la Apple failing to anticipate that their AirTag would facilitate unwanted tracking) and knowing that technology produces negative side effects but releasing it anyway. And though failing to anticipate a clearly anticipatable harm does nothing to absolve designers of responsibility, being able to identify the cause of the issue does give design teams something to look out for and avoid. Invoking timeworn notions of unintended consequences not only won't cut it, but often represents part of the problem. Many of the harms technologies contribute to may not have been intended by designers but they certainly are anticipated and even expected by them. Many of them, moreover, occur not from a technology failing to function as its designers intended, but the very reverse – harm is an unanticipated consequence of the artefact functioning as its designers intended.

If we want to avoid invoking ‘unintended consequences’ to describe any and all negative side effects, we need to properly interrogate the intentional structure between designers, the artefacts they create and the harms these creations are implicated in. This intentional structure is complex. It encompasses not only designers’ intentions for their creations but also their beliefs about what these creations will do. It also encompasses their desires, which come into play in considering whether any unanticipated effects implicating their creation are desirable or undesirable to them.