A Few Concluding Words

The testing stage is also important. When developing the security features on Grindr with the lead designers and engineers, the beta/prototypes of the changes were shown to select experts and community leads in a “is this what you had in mind” manner. Feedback was given and fine tuning was done. This is important as every step and code can have a different outcome- providing more oversight with a more complete understanding and expertise at all the stages creates a finely tuned outcome.

These methods and steps also need to be finetuned and prototyped. These are based on some of the good experiences of implementing such work. The main ethos here, however, is: start with the decentered, have the right experts and create trust, and have all parts of the team involved in the building for the sensitive contexts.

Design From the Margins and focusing on a decentered design process is not about increasing capitalistic profitability, but reducing tech-induced harms by removing focus from the ill-conceived stronghold of who is deemed the main power users188. The real power users are the user bases who befall the structural flaws and blindspots of your systems and then become victims of how your tech is weaponized against them.

DFM is an action-oriented framework that will allow us to reimagine how we see the “extreme,” “outliers,” and victims of harms, human

rights violations and historical and structural disenfranchisement. It is a method that works and has worked in many industries: we need to demand for more from our technologies, especially with the scale of harms seen in their mass scaling. Building our technologies for the most marginalized and the highly criminalized populations makes better tech for all. We have the data for this, it is now time to implement it.

188 Abercrombie, R., 2022. The Problem With Power Users - Usability Geek. [online] Usability Geek. Available at: <https://usabilitygeek.com/problem-with-power-users/> [Accessed 5 April 2022].