Building the Beloved Community: Designing Technologies for Neighborhood Safety

Abstract

Neighborhood safety technologies (NSTs) are digital technologies used for the purpose of increasing safety within the context of a neighborhood. NSTs such as Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Neighbors are some of the most downloaded social and news platforms in the United States and are used in hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods nationwide. Designers of these technologies aim to improve user safety through the development of novel features like real-time alerts, interactive maps, personalized feeds, and the ability to report, consume, and discuss criminal incidents and other safety-related information online. This dissertation investigates how NSTs shape the individuals and communities they aim to serve. All research for this dissertation occurred in Atlanta, Georgia and focuses on the impact of NSTs on Jackson Grove (anonymized), a historically Black neighborhood in the city of Atlanta.Through a case study of the Citizen app, I find that NSTs employ a host of deceptive design patterns that negatively impact individual and collective welfare. NSTs negatively impact individual welfare by contributing to a dysfunctional fear of crime, which undermines a person’s quality of life without making them safer in practice, and NSTs negatively impact collective welfare by strengthening race- and class-based stereotypes. To investigate the potential for design to improve individual welfare, I conduct a mixed-methods study to support users in developing a more functional fear of crime, that is, fear which motivates precaution without negatively impacting quality of life. I identify five concrete design strategies to support users in developing a more accurate and contextualized understanding of risk. At the same time, this research surfaces that such strategies may have hidden costs to the larger communities within which they are adopted. Finally, to investigate the potential for design to improve collective welfare, I conduct a case study of a neighborhood street outreach program. I find that the existing conceptualization of safety as protection contributes to harm and that by adopting an alternative conceptualization of safety that centers basic needs and relationships, designers can better serve users and their communities. My research makes four contributions. The first is an empirical understanding of how NSTs employ deceptive design patterns, harming both individual and collective welfare. Second, I identify concrete design interventions that can support users in developing a functional fear of crime. These interventions contribute to a conceptual understanding of how to design NSTs that support user welfare. Third, I surface the implicit logic underlying the design of existing safety technologies and offer an alternative conceptualization rooted in Transformative Justice principles. Finally, I observe that designers can play a meaningful and intentional role in shaping user behavior by introducing nonviolent design patterns, an alternative to deceptive design patterns, which align the users’ choice architecture with the principles of Transformative Justice. By leveraging nonviolent design patterns, designers can help build a world where it’s easier to love one another, easier to build a Beloved Community.