Black Mirror Brainstorms–thinking the worst about your designs
We’ve seen all major social media platforms (and much more) abused and weaponised. Used to subvert democracies, foment ethnic hatred and violence.But the misuse of digital products and services isn’t just on the world stage. They open other vectors for intimate abuse, stalking, surveillance.The naive days of expecting the best of the good intentions with which we design and build our products and services are over. But what then is to be done about it?In security, penetration testing (or pen testing) is widely used to find security flaws and vulnerabilities in systems.
Dan Brown, with the concept of “Abusability Testing”, and Aaron Z Lewis, with “Black Mirror Brainstorms” (named after the dystopian science fiction series) have proposed a similar idea for exploring flaws in systems that allow for abuse, and other negative outcomes with the aim of closing off these avenues for misuse.
So, in the final session of Design Leaders, we’ll consider common ways in which the things we design can be misused, with insights from Eva Penzeymoog, and former lead design on Twitter’s abuse team, Jon Bell, then conduct our own Black Mirror Brainstorm.
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