survivor-centered-design

Survivor-Centered Design

Survivor-centered design places the rights, needs, safety, and stated preferences of people who have experienced violence at the center of every design decision, rather than treating them as a population to be managed. A survivor-centered approach prioritises a survivor’s safety, agency, and wellbeing, and insists that survivors be involved at every stage of design and implementation — not consulted once and then designed around. In service and product terms it translates into the trauma-informed commitments of safety, choice, consent, collaboration, trustworthiness, and empowerment, and into reframing the operative question from “why isn’t this survivor ready?” to “what does this survivor need right now to feel safe?”. It treats lived experience as expertise and resists building tools for survivors without building them with survivors.

The approach is closely tied to Trauma-Informed Design (its principles overlap heavily) and is the practical lens through which a vault tool is judged to genuinely centre the Victim-Survivor. It is informed by Feminist HCI and design-justice thinking, which name whose voices design usually erases. Survivor-centered design also sets a critical boundary against Techno-Solutionism: a flashy feature that increases a survivor’s exposure, or that an abuser can repurpose, fails the test no matter how clever, which is why these projects weigh Privacy and Safety and the realities of Coercive Control before shipping.

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Related toTrauma-Informed Design
CentresVictim-Survivor
Informed byFeminist HCI
Tension withTechno-Solutionism

Sources

https://www.spotlightinitiative.org/design-survivor-centred-programme
https://wscadv.org/projects/domestic-violence-housing-first/toolkit/survivor-driven-trauma-informed-mobile-advocacy/

Tags: #concept #design #survivor-centered

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techno-solutionism

Techno-Solutionism

Techno-solutionism is the assumption that complex social and political problems can be fixed with technology. In anti-violence tech it shows up as the belief that the right gadget or app can “prevent sexual assault” or “ensure the safety of women” — a framing critiqued at length in The Safest Woman Alive and Datafication of MeToo. The danger is twofold: it shifts the burden of prevention onto victim-survivors (who must buy, learn, and correctly use devices), and it draws attention and funding away from structural change addressed by the other Four Domains of Power.

This is the central tension running through the vault: tools can genuinely help in a crisis, but should be weighed against Trauma-Informed Design, feminist critique, and the limits of what design alone can do.

In this vault

Critiqued byFour Domains of Power
Tension withPersonal Safety Apps

feminist-hci

Feminist HCI

Feminist HCI is the subfield of human-computer interaction that brings feminist theory, critical theory, and standpoint epistemology to bear on how interactive systems are conceived, built, and evaluated. Its founding statement is Shaowen Bardzell’s 2010 CHI paper Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design, which offered both contribution criteria (theory, methodology, user research, evaluation) and a “constellation” of feminist interaction design qualities — pluralism, participation, advocacy, ecology, embodiment, and self-disclosure — meant to guide and assess design as it unfolds. The agenda extends to questions usually left implicit in HCI: scientific objectivity, whose values get encoded, how data is collected and interpreted, designer reflexivity, and the unintended consequences of the systems we ship.

The lineage runs forward into Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice (2020), which frames design as operating within a “matrix of domination” and argues for processes led by, not merely consulted with, marginalised communities — showing, for example, how normative design erases trans and disabled users. For anti-violence technology, feminist HCI supplies the theoretical backbone of Trauma-Informed Design and Survivor-Centered Design: it names power, insists on participation, and treats embodiment and lived experience as design knowledge. It also grounds critique of Techno-Solutionism and of safety tools that ignore how systems are situated in real relationships of Gender-Based Violence and Coercive Control.

In this vault

Sources

https://des4div.library.northeastern.edu/bardzell-feministhci/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_HCI
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262043458/design-justice/

Tags: #concept #theory #hci

victim-survivor

Victim-Survivor

Victim-survivor is the term used in much lived-experience-led practice (including Insight Exchange’s) for a person who has been subjected to violence and abuse. It deliberately holds both realities at once — the harm done to a person and their ongoing agency — and signals a stance of centring that person’s own meaning, pace and decisions, as in Trauma-Informed Design and Survivor-Centered Design.

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Related toTrauma-Informed Design
Subjected toGender-Based Violence

trauma-informed-design

Trauma-Informed Design

Trauma-informed design builds tools around the realities of people who have experienced violence: defaults that fail safe, control left in the user’s hands, language that validates rather than directs, and the assumption that a device may be monitored. It is closely tied to Survivor-Centered Design and underpins discreet, dignified experiences. Insight Exchange’s resources — My Safety Kit, Responders Lab, No Hidden Door — are practical expressions of the approach.

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coercive-control

Coercive Control

Coercive control is a pattern of domination — isolation, intimidation, monitoring, and financial and emotional control — that defines much Intimate Partner Violence and Domestic Violence, and which physical assault alone fails to capture. It is the dynamic that makes Tech-Enabled Abuse so potent: surveillance and information-control are not incidental to the abuse, they are the abuse. Tools designed for stranger danger often miss it; survivor-centred resources such as My Safety Kit are built around it.

In this vault

Subtype ofGender-Based Violence
Manifests inTech-Enabled Abuse
Related toStalking

privacy-and-safety

Privacy and Safety

Privacy and safety are often treated as the same goal in anti-violence technology, but for a Victim-Survivor they pull in opposite directions and must be balanced deliberately. The data that makes a safety tool useful — real-time Location Sharing, cloud backups, message logs kept as Evidence Documentation — is exactly the data an abuser will try to reach if they retain access to a device, account, or family plan. NNEDV’s Safety Net Project frames technology safety as protecting “safety, privacy, accessibility, and civil rights” together, and stresses that the burden should fall on holding perpetrators accountable, not solely on survivors restricting themselves. Yet practical safety planning still requires hard privacy choices: which device is trustworthy, which accounts are compromised, and what should never be stored where an abuser can find it.

This is why every safety app sits in tension here. A design that collects rich location history to “build evidence” also builds a honeypot that Stalkerware or a coercive partner can exploit, and the Datafication of MeToo critique shows how such collection can become extraction rather than protection. Privacy-protective alternatives respond with data minimisation, on-device storage, encryption, and Discreet Access, and safety guidance cautions that even removing monitoring can escalate danger if an abuser feels they’ve “lost control.” Getting this balance right is the central problem of Survivor-Centered Design and Trauma-Informed Design.

In this vault

Tension withPersonal Safety Apps
Threatened byStalkerware
Related toDiscreet Access
Related toSurvivor-Centered Design