Damage-centered Design

An approach in HCI and design research that frames marginalized communities - including disabled people, BIPOC communities, and others - primarily through the lens of harms, deficits, and barriers to be remediated. The term, popularized by Eve Tuck and extended by Alexandra To and colleagues, names a pattern in which research and design center suffering and exclusion at the expense of strengths, joy, creativity, and self-defined goals. In accessibility, damage-centered framings produce assistive technologies that treat disabled users as objects of repair rather than as agents with expertise; flourishing-oriented and disability-justice-oriented approaches are explicit responses to this pattern, asking instead what disabled communities want to become, create, and celebrate.