Designing Support for Systematic Sociotechnical Risk Literacy

Risk literacy in technology contexts concerns the ability to understand, assess, and make informed decisions about risks and their implications.This requires understanding the landscape of sociotechnical harms, as well as cultivating skills for identifying social and technical sources of harms, interpreting probabilistic information, understanding uncertainty, evaluating risk-benefit tradeoffs, and making decisions with incomplete information.Despite efforts to educate diverse audiences on technological risks and harms, these efforts are often ad-hoc and issue-driven.To move beyond issue-based approaches, we need a systematic approach to understanding technology's role in harm and assessing risk across sociotechnical contexts -what we term "systematic sociotechnical risk literacy".In this workshop, we will experiment with existing harms frameworks to develop a toolkit for teaching systematic risks across different contexts.This will equip educators to teach digital safety and foster coherence through shared language and practices.Ultimately, systematic digital risk literacy will enable engineers, policymakers, and researchers to collaboratively shape computing's future and navigate future uncertainties.