What is Design From the Margins?
Design From the Margins (DFM) is a design methodology for more just, equitable, safer tech that centers the most impacted and decentered users, from ideation to production. DFM is grounded in the knowledge that when those most marginalized are designed for, we are all designed for.
Using DFM, we meet people where they are, with the systems they use, basing our approach in harm reduction. Through deep community-focused research, methods, and strategies we work to block extractivism from decentered communities and enforce their power in building better and safer tech.
The DFM methodology was created following years of work with marginalized communities from activists in Iran to refugees in detention centers and camps, and queer communities in the Middle East and North Africa. The work is a combination of community-based research, movement lawyering, and harm reduction-focused tech interventions.
See how DFM has been discussed and implemented, including case studies and harm-reductions changes, on our Resources page.
Through our work and our relationships, we know that the most criminalized are the most at risk of having technology weaponized against them. The largest impacts of West-created technologies fall on countries and contexts they were not designed for.
Through resistance, decentered communities have collaboratively generated key insights for how to navigate tech products more safely: these can be translated into better tools for everyone. After all, when the most at-risk and disenfranchised are safe, we are all safe.
DFM has a proven track record of impact, having facilitated major design and engineering innovations at platforms including Grindr, Signal, and WhatsApp to disrupt the weaponization of platforms in policing and targeting decentered users, and in effect benefiting millions of users around the world.
