Ron Bronson
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concept

Consequence Design

Framework for understanding downstream effects of design decisions. Helping teams identify harm at scale, over time, and in edge cases before they ship.

The problem

Design discourse focuses on intent and immediate outcomes. But many of the worst design failures aren’t caused by bad intentions—they’re caused by decisions that seemed reasonable in isolation but created harm at scale, over time, or in edge cases nobody anticipated.

What I did

  • Developed a framework for identifying “consequence moments” in system design
  • Created workshop formats for teams to map potential downstream harms
  • Built a vocabulary that bridges design, policy, and engineering perspectives
  • Spoke at conferences and wrote about the approach

What this demonstrates

I think about design at the systems level—not just “did the user complete the task?” but “what happens next, and to whom?”