Designing for Online & Offline Safety
A Women-Centric Design Conversation
Safety and safe spaces are the #1 recurring topic during our conversations with gender practitioners around the world. Bringing together the creators of Make Space for Girls (an advocate for safe public spaces for teenage girls); Chayn (a community based support platform for gender-based violence survivors); and Backed Technologies (on a mission to end online leaked content without consent) — we discuss what makes a space safe – and how safety-centred practitioners design for it – both online and offline.
The Importance of Safety
1. Safety Enables Participation and Inclusion
When people, particularly women, girls, and marginalized genders, don’t feel safe, they withdraw from public and online spaces.
Impact: Society loses out on their voices, creativity, businesses, leadership, and contributions.
"Harm isn’t just something you experience physically, it’s also something you feel in your heart. So you withdraw from public spaces, whether online or offline, because you don’t feel safe in them. The world misses out on creativity, businesses, relationships, and citizenship." Hera Hussain
2. Safety Supports Mental Health & Well-Being
Spaces (both online and offline) designed without safety in mind lead to stress, anxiety, and exclusion, particularly for teenage girls.
Research shows that access to outdoor spaces improves mental health—but when girls feel unwelcome in parks, they miss out on this benefit.
"If we take teenage girls out of urban public spaces, we're basically saying, ‘you don’t belong in the community.’ It’s a discrimination issue, a health issue, and a rights issue." Susannah Walker
3. Lack of Safety Can Have Long-Term Consequences
Online abuse can spill into real life, affecting confidence, opportunities, and decision-making (e.g., young women choosing not to enter politics due to online harassment).
Example: Victims of online image-based abuse may never fully escape the trauma since content spreads quickly and is difficult to remove.
"Online amplifies abuse. What used to be an embarrassing moment shared within a small group is now something that can go viral, affecting someone’s entire life." Laura Bloomer
Designing for Safety
1. Safety is About More Than Just Physical Harm—It’s About Belonging
Safety isn’t just about the risk of physical violence; it’s also about feeling welcome, included, and having the right to occupy spaces.
Teenage girls, for example, often feel pushed out of public spaces—not because of direct threats but because they are subtly (or overtly) made to feel unwelcome.
2. Designing for the Most Vulnerable Benefits Everyone
Instead of designing for the “average” user and then adapting for marginalized groups, the panelists emphasized starting with the most vulnerable (e.g., survivors, teenage girls, disabled individuals).
A great example is how door handles were redesigned to be more accessible—benefiting not just disabled people but also those carrying heavy objects.
3. Online and Offline Spaces Are Interconnected
Online and offline safety are deeply intertwined—what happens in one space often impacts the other.
For example, online abuse can spill into real life, and for some women, online spaces provide the only safe place for expression.
The metaphor of the internet as a garden—with thriving, well-maintained areas and neglected, toxic areas—highlights the role of designers and organizers in shaping safer online environments.
4. Safety is About Visibility, Not Just Surveillance
In public spaces, true safety comes not from cameras or security but from active, diverse, and inclusive spaces.
The presence of different types of people—women, families, elderly individuals—creates a safer environment than isolated, surveilled locations.
Parks, for example, should be designed to encourage organic gatherings, not just monitored through security measures.
5. Men & Boys Need to Be Part of the Solution
Often, conversations around safety and gender-based violence exclude men, even though they are key to shifting norms.
Rather than assuming men should “already know” how to support, providing clear guidance, patience, and education can make a big difference in engaging them as allies.
About the speakers
Susannah Walker is the founder of Make Space for Girls. She is also an author and former tv producer, who was outraged when she realised that not only had her local council only provided outdoor facilities for teenage boys, but they didn’t propose to do anything about it either.
Hera is the Founder and CEO of CHAYN - a global nonprofit that creates resources on the web to address gender-based violence. Chayn’s multi-lingual resources, designed with not for survivors, have reached more than 500 000 people. Raised in Pakistan and living in the UK, Hera knew from early on she wanted to tackle violence against women. She believes in using the power of open source technology, trauma-informed design and hope-filled framing to solve the world's pressing issues. Hera was on the Forbes 30 Under 30 and MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 list.
Laura Bloomer is the founder of Backed Technologies. Laura is interested in the intersect between business x society x technology, and passionate about entrepreneurship, equal opportunity and empathetic authentic leadership.