On the margins of a debate on who are we designing for nowadays – meatware or AI agents – I found myself thinking about the terms different industries use for the humans they work with.

Aviation doesn’t have passengers. It has PAX. Officially short for ‘passengers’, apparently the industry loves -x abbreviations (MX for maintenance, CX for cancellation). Which gives you gems like ‘PAX weight’ and ‘direct PAX’ – neatly parallel to “cargo weight” and “direct cargo.” At some point you stop talking about people and start talking about a particularly inconvenient type of freight.

Telecoms. You think you’re a customer, but you’re a SIM card. Or a number. Or several SIM cards and numbers. It’s great when you’re an active SIM card though – the industry appreciates initiative.

Retail has ‘footfall’. In theory, the number of people entering a location in a given period. In practice, you get ‘footfall marketing’ and ‘footfall segmentation’, where the human quietly disappears into the sound of their own steps.

And then there’s ‘Human Resources’. Hard not to smile when you realise you’re someone’s human resource – right alongside financial, material, and intellectual ones. It’s almost funny that before you’re hired, you get Employee Experience communication, and after signing the contract, you get Human Resources management. In the best case, you become a Talent.

What connects all of these is metaphor – or more precisely, metonymy and synecdoche. We use analogy (pax = cargo; human resources = material resources) or part for whole (footsteps instead of visitors; SIM cards instead of customers). It’s more countable, therefore more objective, precise, manageable. The fact that the human gets lost along the way is an unfortunate detail with consequences that are hard to pin down but quietly grim.

To be fair: in UX and CX teams, these terms came up less often, and usually a little sheepishly. So – what does your industry call its people? Do you still serve humans?