Product Impact Tool

Technology impacts people in different ways, from individual to societal and from overt to hidden. The Product Impact tool makes you think about the relationship between people and technology and gives you tools for how to deal with it as a developer of new technology.

In a neutral way, the Product Impact Tool gives a complete and clear picture of all the different types of impact that technological applications can have on people. The result: you take a fresh look at all products and your designs. With the help of the workshop, you can then actively work on them and develop applications that will be more user-friendly and accepted.

The Product Impact Tool is an interactive web tool. The tool provides an overview of different types of product impact with clear examples, accompanying worksheets, and a card set. The tool is a starting point for ethical reflection and (re)design of products with the aim of usability, acceptance, or behavioural change.

The interactive web tool is a practical way for you or your team to better understand the different ways of product impact. With the worksheets and cards with various assignments and questions, it is also possible to analyse and improve the product impact of your application (idea) in a workshop. In the yellow quadrant ‘at-hand’, for instance, you can ask yourself to what extent your application influences the user to do something he did not initially intend to do. You can then discuss together whether or not you think this is desirable for your application and come up with ideas, inspired by the many examples, on how to prevent or reinforce this.

The Product Impact Tool does not try to impose a view on what is right or wrong, but wants to inform about the different forms of (hidden) impact of technology on people. In doing so, the tool aims to encourage developers to think about and discuss this during the (re)development of new applications.

The Product Impact tool was designed by Steven Dorrestijn. He is a lecturer in Ethics & Technology at Saxion University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. From the point of view of engineering philosophy, he created the Product Impact Tool and has since, together with others, further developed it for practical use in workshops and design processes.

This tool was not developed by the Knowledge Center Data & Society. We describe the tool on our website because it can help you deal with ethical, legal, or social aspects of AI applications. The Knowledge Centre is not responsible for the quality of the tool.