Greater Than Code

Greater Than Code


252: Designing For Safety with Eva PenzeyMoog

September 29, 2021

TRIGGER WARNING: Domestic Violence, Abuse, Interpersonal Safety

01:26 - Eva’s Superpower: ADHD and Hyperfocus

Workplace Accommodation
At-Will Employment

08:19 - Design for Safety

Tech Used For Interpersonal Harm
Might vs When
Eva Penzey Moog | Designing Against Domestic Violence
Weaponizing Technology

12:45 - What Engineers Need to Know

Control/Shared Accounts
Surveillance
Location Data

15:02 - Expanding Our Understanding of What “User” Means

“User as an abstraction.”

20:43 - Parallels with Security

Personas / Archetypes
Adding Layers of Friction
Ongoing Arms Race

22:23 - Spreading Awareness Across Teams Focused on Feature Delivery

Safety Designers as a Specialized Role?
Generalists vs Specialists; Literacy vs Fluency
This Book Is For Everyone: Engineers, Designers, Product Managers, etc.

31:38 - Thinking Beyond The User

Constituency
Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need By Sasha Costanza-Chock

35:25 - Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy

We Prioritize The Safety of Marginalized People Over the Comfort of Unmarginalized People
How Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy (Workshop)
Kim Crayton: Intention Without Strategy is Chaos
Sitting with Discomfort

40:21 - Putting Ergonomics, Safety, and Security Behind Paywalls

“Ergonomics is the marriage of design and ethics.”
The History of Seatbelts
Government Regulation
Worker Organizing

45:58 - Tech Workers and Privilege

Overpaid/Underpaid

Reflections:

Mandy: Inclusive and accessible technology includes people experiencing domestic abuse.

Damien: If a product can be used for harm, it will be.

Coraline: How systems are weaponized against marginalized and vulnerable folks.

The internet is good for connecting people with shared experiences but we’re breaking into smaller and smaller groups. Are we propping up systems by taking a narrow view based on our own experiences?

Eva: Who didn’t teach you about this?

It’s our job to keep ourselves safe in tech. Tech companies need to take more responsibility for user safety.

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Transcript:

MANDY: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode number 252. My name is Mandy Moore and today, I'm here with Damien Burke.

DAMIEN: Hi, and I am here with Coraline Ada Ehmke.

CORALINE: Wow. I actually showed up for once. [laughs] I'm very happy to be with y'all today and I'm very excited about the guest that we have today.

Her name is Eva PenzeyMoog and Eva is a principal designer at 8th Light and the author of Design for Safety.

Before joining the tech field, she worked in the non-profit space and volunteered as a domestic violence educator and rape crisis counselor. At 8th Light, she specializes in user experience design as well as education and consulting in the realm of digital safety design. Her work brings together her expertise in domestic violence and technology, helping technologists understand how their creations facilitate interpersonal harm and how to prevent it through intentionally prioritizing the most vulnerable users.

Eva, I'm so happy to have you here today. Hi!

EVA: Hi, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

CORALINE: So if I recall correctly and it has been a while so Mandy, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we open with the same question that we've been opening with for 251 other episodes and Eva, that is, what is your superpower and how did you discover, or develop it?

EVA: Yeah, so my superpower is my ADHD, actually [chuckles] and specifically my ability to hyperfocus and I didn't really acquire and start to un