CONCEPT
Designer Fallacy
Ihde's name for the persistent error of assuming that a designer's intended use determines the technology's actual mediation — an assumption that collapses entirely for AI, whose relational stabilizations vastly exceed any designer's predictive capacity.
The designer fallacy names an assumption so embedded in common thought about technology that naming it feels almost unnecessary: that the designer knows what the technology is for, and that uses which depart from design intention are misuses. Ihde argued throughout his career that this assumption is empirically false (technologies routinely escape their intended uses) and philosophically pernicious (it misdirects analysis away from actual mediations and toward imagined ones). The hammer's designer intended nail-driving; the hammer also became a weapon, a sculpture, a symbol. The telephone's designer intended business communication; the telephone became an instrument of intimacy, rebellion, and lifeline. Applied to AI, the fallacy becomes categorically inadequate: the gap between intended and actual stabilizations is wider than for any previous technology, because the medium of language places almost no constraint on the purposes to which the tool can be put.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The fallacy has both empirical and philosophical dimensions. Empirically, intended uses