Design for Safety, An Excerpt

According to anti-racist scholar Kim Crayton, “intention without plan is chaos.” We’ve discussed how our prejudices, beliefs, and carelessness toward marginalized and resilient parties lead to dangerous and irresponsible tech—but what, precisely, do we need to do to fix it? The intention to make our technical safer is not enough, we need a plan.

You will have that plan of action in this book. It covers how to incorporate safety concepts into your design work to create healthy tech, how to persuade your stakeholders that this work is required, and how to respond to criticism that what we really need is more variety. ( Spoiler: we do, but diversity alone is not the antidote to fixing unethical, unsafe tech. )

The procedure for equitable safety

When you are designing for health, your goals are to:

• determine the best ways to abuse your solution.
• style ways to prevent the maltreatment, and
• offer assistance for customers who are prone to regain control and power.

To help you accomplish those objectives, you can use the Process for Inclusive Safety ( Fig. 5.1 ). It’s a method I developed in 2018 to better understand the different methods I used to create products that were designed with safety in mind. The Process can assist you in making your product secure and inclusive, whether you are creating a completely new product or updating an already existing feature. The Process includes five main public areas of action:

• Conducting study
• Creating tropes
• Pondering problems
• Designing options
• Testing for health

The Process is meant to be flexible—it didn’t make feeling for teams to adopt every stage in some circumstances. Use only the parts that are pertinent to your particular job and setting; this is meant to be something you can incorporate into your existing design process.

And if you’ve used it, if you’ve got ideas for improving it, or just want to give an example of how it helped your group, please get in touch with me. It’s a life document, which I aspire to use for the long term.