Maskinvänt

Maskinvänt is a term appearing in Swedish-language discussions about technology design and evaluation. It refers to an orientation or stance in which systems are designed and assessed primarily for machine-centric criteria—such as automated processing, scalability, or machine interpretability—rather than for human comprehension or usability. The word is a compound of maskin ("machine") and vänt, past participle of vända ("to turn" or "to face"), conveying the sense of something being turned toward machines.

Usage and interpretation: The concept is often contrasted with human-centered or user-centered design. In maskinvänt approaches, evaluation pipelines, interfaces, and data representations are optimized for machine readability and automated metrics, sometimes at the expense of transparency or human interpretability. Proponents argue that machine-facing design can improve automation, reproducibility, and efficiency, while critics warn it may reduce accessibility for humans and obscure biases.

Applications: Maskinvänt considerations appear in discussions about logging and observability, data labeling schemes that favor machine parsing, and model evaluation regimes that privilege automated scores over human judgments. It is also discussed in relation to explainability, where tension can arise between machine-oriented metrics and human explanations.

See also: human-centered design, explainable AI, machine learning, human-in-the-loop, data governance.

Because the term is not widely standardized, usage varies by context and author.