Brittleness as default
Services ship without refusal pathways, redundancy, or trauma-aware operations, so minor shocks cascade into incidents.
Field primer
Ethotechnics is a field for making maintenance risk legible before systems break people.
It synthesizes design research, operations science, and community accountability to keep refusal, reversibility, and care resourced.
Ethotechnics names the intellectual commitments, canonical problems, and diagnostic rituals that surface when frontline fatigue meets brittle infrastructure. As a field, it offers a conceptual synthesis: identify maintenance debt early, redistribute responsibility, and build governance that can absorb shock.
Intellectual commitments grounded in maintenance, refusal, and reversibility.
Canonical problems translated from patterns of exhaustion, brittleness, and harm.
Conceptual synthesis connecting diagnostics, rituals, and governance redesign.
The field packages what practitioners learn into problems, playbooks, and predictive drills that keep care visible.
care-centered diagnostics
predictive maintenance drills
accountability architectures
Trajectory of the field
A conceptual synthesis built from frontline maintenance work.
Ethotechnics formalizes lessons from mutual aid, community health, civic technology, and responsible AI into a field that maps maintenance debt and names what accountability requires.
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Fielded from maintenance debt
Organizers, technologists, and healers compared notes on the invisible labor propping up brittle systems.
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Named as canonical problems
We recorded recurring patterns of brittleness, overload, and collapse to make early detection and refusal possible.
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Shared as a library and discipline
The field now includes diagnostic playbooks, glossaries, and practice notes others can extend across sectors.
Canonical problems
The field tracks predictable maintenance failures.
Ethotechnics catalogs canonical problems that show up when infrastructure leans on unfunded maintenance and brittle governance. These problems surface patterns the field can diagnose early and redesign against.
Unfunded maintenance labor
Stewards are asked to mask structural decay with heroics, absorbing hidden load without rest, debriefs, or power to redirect work.
Accountability collapse
When maintainers leave, knowledge, care, and safeguards leave with them—exposing how accountability was personal, not structural.
Ethotechnics turns these problems into diagnostics, patterns, and rituals that keep care resourced.
Field commitments
What anchors Ethotechnics as a field.
Ethotechnics is stewarded as a field of study and practice. The studio operationalizes these commitments through diagnostics, rituals, and prototypes. Learn about the steward guiding the field and the commitments that shape every inquiry.
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Kanav Jain
Field steward & principal investigator
Kanav convenes Ethotechnics as a field after years guiding public-interest digital service teams through crisis response, reliability remediation, and governance redesign. He co-authored the research agenda, stewards the glossary of canonical problems, and facilitates maintenance readiness labs; see his professional profile.
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Multidisciplinary inquiry
We convene designers, technologists, organizers, healers, and policymakers to keep the field accountable to lived maintenance work.
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Networked stewardship
The field invites collaborators—from trauma-informed facilitators to policy strategists—when a canonical problem demands broader expertise.
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Accountable storytelling
We document diagnostic findings with consent so communities benefit from the stories that shape the field.
Where the field is applied
Ethotechnics travels across healthcare, civic tech, and AI governance.
Canonical problems grounded in 100M+ safeguarded clinician calls
Diagnostic playbooks tested in national health system rollouts
Accountability rituals codified with AI, civic, and health teams
Dialer as critical infrastructure
Patterns from scaling Doximity Dialer turned into refusal pathways, runbooks, and risk signals within the field.
Epic rollouts that held
Hospital integrations revealed canonical problems around reversibility and handoffs, now formalized within Ethotechnics.
Accountability by default
Cross-functional review rituals became templates for accountability architectures other teams can adopt.
The studio operationalizes the field with healthcare platforms, civic tech coalitions, and AI labs to pilot maintenance rituals and accountability frameworks.
Read the foundational essays on syadvada.com to trace how Ethotechnics synthesizes diagnostics, rituals, and governance.
“Ethotechnics rebuilt our readiness drills so clinicians, compliance, and ops share the same playbook for maintenance.”
“Maintenance labs gave our civic network language to name hidden labor, budget for repair, and argue for refusal.”
“Their frameworks shape how our AI lab builds human review loops and accountability architectures each sprint.”
What drives us
Care is the metric.
Ethotechnics exists because systems often rely on invisible labor. We choose to build infrastructures where rest, refusal, and repair are built-in.
Our commitments
- Design for refusal, not obedience
- Encode reversibility, not frictionlessness
- Expect human limits, not heroism
- Allocate load fairly, not invisibly
- Make accountability structural, not personal
- Build institutions that absorb shock, not export it
- Make harm expensive to the system, not to the human
Where we draw lines
Ethotechnics is NOT
We refuse framings that turn maintenance into branding exercises or siloed audits. If you need quick optics, we're not the right fit.
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A design ethics refresher
We don't sell checklist trainings—we co-design accountability with the stewards already carrying maintenance debt.
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Innovation theater
There are no brainstorm pageants here. We focus on predictive drills, not novelty for its own sake.
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Compliance checkbox vendor
We won't launder harm through thin audits. Safeguards stay grounded in lived risk, not paperwork alone.
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PR spin or reputation cleanup
We partner where refusal and reversibility are on the table, not to polish narratives around fragile systems.
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