By their pervasiveness and by being worn on our bodies, mobile phones seem to have become intrinsic to safety. To examine this proposition, 43 participants, from four stakeholder groups, were asked to consider how homeless young people could use mobile phones to keep safe. To enable a comprehensive analysis of safety and other value tensions at the research site, researchers drew on principles of Value Sensitive Design. Participants were asked to express their knowledge for place-based safety and to envision how mobile phones might be used to improve safety. Detailed analysis of the resulting data, which included value sketches, written value scenarios, and semistructured discussion, led to specific design opportunities, related to values (e.g., supporting trust and desire to help others), function (e.g., documenting harms for future purposes), and form (e.g., leveraging social expectations for how mobile phones can be used to influence behavior). Together, these findings bound a design space for how mobile phones can be used to manage unsafe situations. In addition to the design opportunities, researchers: (1) Documented rich knowledge about the interaction among place, mobile phone technology, and safety for a historically underrepresented population, homeless young people; (2) Demonstrated the use of innovative open-ended yet structured methods to elicit views on a sensitive topic (personal safety) in a non-threatening and dignified manner, leaving what information to reveal and how under the control of the participant; (3) Constructed coding manuals that can be used and extended by others to analyze the relationships among place, mobile phone technology, and safety; and (4) Extended a method (i.e., value scenarios generated by participants) in Value Sensitive Design, thereby contributing to that growing literature.

Authors: Jill Palzkill Woelfer, Amy Iverson, David G. Hendry, Batya Friedman, and Brian T. Gill.