Safety Centred Design

Feeling safe is a fundamental human need, but is often overlooked—often affecting women more

If you’ve come to one of our Design for Women Workshops, you know that I spend a lot of that time talking about safety and safe spaces. “Safety is the #1 recurring topic in my research with gender practitioners,” I say. Feeling safe is a fundamental human need, and yet, most products and services aren’t actively thinking about it. I wonder if this is because it matters more to women and so we are used to overlooking it.

I’ve found two areas that are actively designing for safety, and to me, they are on either end of the safety spectrum: women-centric communities (very safe) and digital spaces (unsafe). Women-centric communities are, in some ways, “automatically safer” because they are women-only, and yet these community practitioners do not take safety for granted. Instead, acknowledging the benefits of safety, they design for it actively. On the other hand, digital ethics and citizenship practitioners know that their field was built to thrive on virality — and so they stay ahead of the game, constantly evaluating how a digital feature could lead to harm or trauma.

Here are a few ways that they both design for safety:

→ Having and enforcing codes of conduct:

This sets a safety precedent up-front signalling that harassment will not be tolerated.

→ Normalising requests for support:

This might be through visual imagery or language to set the tone or by including an activity during a community call that lets everyone practice asking for help.

→ Not backing down on safety features:

Just because your SOS button or website exit button isn’t being used doesn’t mean it’s time to remove it. Instead, continue to observe how users are engaging with your product’s safety features and make safety a key part of your product’s success metrics.

Safety-centred practice has been around for years, but it continues to exist in niches. Now it’s up to us as product and service designers — operating in the middle of that safety spectrum — to embed safety-first principles into our user experiences. Are there products and services that make you feel safe?

This post is an excerpt from Unconforming: a newsletter about Design for Women. Unconforming goes out every two weeks and also shares learnings from experts, job and other opportunities, examples and articles — all to make an impact in the women’s space. Sign up here to get it in your inbox!