Design From the Margins: Centering the Decentered

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There is a far reaching demand to design technology for marginalized people. We need to take this idea out of abstraction and show that it can work for everyday communication technologies in the same way that it has worked in countless other contexts.  In many industries there are successful examples of design patterns that focus on the “extremes”, “outliers” and “edge cases” (which is what marginalized people are often seen as in design) as a fundamental core - this should be applied to communication technologies. 

With experts from technology and human rights fields,  including company representatives from Grindr and WhatsApp, TAPP fellow Afsaneh Rigot will discuss her new research documenting the impact of tech on LGBTQ people in the Middle East and North Africa and a new design methodology – Design From the Margins — that looks to provide established ways to center and mitigate harms faced by at-risk and marginalized people from the weaponization of tech.