Building the Beloved Community: Designing Safety Technologies to Support a Functional Fear of Crime

Safety platforms like Nextdoor and Citizen can increase users’ fear of crime by broadcasting frequent, local, and personalized information about potential safety risks. These platforms can contribute to a dysfunctional fear of crime, that is, fear that undermines a person’s quality of life without making them safer in practice. Understanding how the design of a platform promotes dysfunctional fear is critical, as dysfunctional fear is associated with poor mental health, mistrust, social disconnection, and support for punitive policies, such as the death penalty.

In this dissertation, I investigate specific design decisions that contribute to a dysfunctional fear of crime and how designers might instead support users of safety platforms in developing a more functional fear of crime. Through a case study of the Citizen app, surveys, interviews, and co-design activities, I identify specific features that have the potential to make users feel more or less fearful. Finally, I design and evaluate a specific “Good News” intervention to understand how this feature works in the wild.

My research makes four contributions. The first is a new empirical understanding of how safety technologies impact individual and collective well being. This understanding can help us reflect on the state of existing safety technologies and the potential harm they cause. 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 more socially responsible safety technologies. Third, I offer a proof of concept intervention and evidence about its effectiveness in the wild and how it may influence peoples' trust and openness to one another. I conclude by reflecting on the power that designers hold in shaping users’ perceptions of reality and offer a set of guiding questions for designers of digital media interested in interrogating the narratives created by design.

Supervisory Committee
Co-chair: Alexis Hiniker, Associate Professor, University of Washington, Information School
Co-chair: Jason Yip, Associate Professor, University of Washington, Information School
Member: Christopher Le Dantec, Associate Professor, Northeastern University, College of Arts, Media, and Design
GSR: Daniela Rosner, Associate Professor, University of Washington, Human Centered Design and Engineering