74 questions for a trauma-informed designer

Trauma-Informed Design Reflections #15

This week I once again found myself inspired by the book Feminist Designer. In it there is a piece by Jennifer Armbrust called “50 questions for every designer”.

That got me thinking: what would a similar piece look like, if it was focused on trauma-informed design? It goes without saying that I wrote it. I like the questions I came up with, but what I liked the most was the process of getting to those questions. It helped me push the boundaries of what I knew and discover novel ideas.

I strongly recommend you try the same. You can pick a pen and paper, set a timer, put on your favourite song (or songs if you’re not like me and don’t enjoy listening to the same song 100 times in a row), and start writing. You can see it as a brainstorming exercise, which means no constraints to the questions you right down. You can summarize them afterwards.

I hope you try the exercise, but regardless here’s a polished list of my questions. This is by no means an exclusive list, it’s not meant to be used as a check-list, and not everything is applicable to every design. It’s more of a way to consider multiple ideas and new perspectives.

I hope you gain something from reading it. And if you try the exercise, I’d love to read your list. Maybe we can make a collective one… :)

Safety

• Who am I designing for? Am I designing primarily for survivors? Am I (also) designing for people in crisis?
• Are the people who use my design safe while using it? Do they feel safe?
• Can I help them feel (even) safer? How?
• What does safety look like for the people I’m designing for/with?
• Are the people I’m designing for feeling safe in their everyday life? How does my design intersect with that?
• Is my design creating a false sense of safety? How can I change that?
• Do I have practices in place to support someone who might feel unsafe when using my design?
• How can I monitor potential risks in my design? How can I handle them so that my design won’t become unsafe in the future?
• When practicing co-design, are the co-designers feeling safe? How are the ruptures in safety repaired?
• Does working on this design feel safe for me and my colleagues? Does working with this organization feel safe for me and my colleagues?
• Who is the guardian of people’s safety in my organization? What is their power inside the organization?
• In the case of AI, how can I test the safety of the model’s responses? Under which conditions is this testing happening?

Trustworthiness and Transparency

• Is my design doing what it says? Is it saying what it does?
• What steps am I taking to build trust with the people who use my design?
• Is important information communicated clearly? (e.g. How are data collected, used, and managed? Are they shared with third parties?)?
• Which information is considered important?
• When asking for information from the user, is why I am asking them clear?
• How can I make terms and conditions, privacy policy, and other legal pieces of content clearer and easier to understand?
• Am I consciously avoiding dark patterns, misleading content, clickbaits, and deceptive design in general? Am I avoiding shameful language?
• When providing information, is it accurate?
• Is my code open-source? Can it be?
• Is the use of or lack of encryption openly communicated?
• How can I be more transparent about my design process?
• If I do user interviews, am I transparent about: how I will use the responses of the interviewee, who will see the interview, whether the interview will be recorded or not, and for how long I will keep these data.
• Do I trust my organization?
• In the case of AI, is there transparency around how the models are trained? Where are the training data coming from?

Peer Support

• Does my design allow for the people who use it to directly interact with each other? Does it allow for them to indirectly interact with each other? (e.g. reviews, crowdsourced data)
• How can people who use my design feel supported? In which ways do they want to feel supported?
• Can my design be a place to seek support for those who don’t have support in their day to day life?
• Do people feel more isolated or more connected after using my design?
• Does my design foster connection or competition? In the case of competition, how can I change it to connection?
• Is there a power difference between the people who interact via my design? Can I mitigate it? How?
• Is anonymity possible in my design? Is it safe?
• Am I ethically displaying reviews and using social proof? Would the use of AI make this harder?
• When practicing co-design, do the co-designers feel supported by each other?
• Do I feel supported by my colleagues while working on this design? Do they feel supported by me?

Collaboration and Mutuality

• Am I practicing participatory design? Am I co-designing?
• Am I challenging the assumption of “the designer as the expert”?
• Am I listening to people’s needs? How am I implementing what they are telling me?
• Do I center lived experiences?
• How can I be more relational and less extractive?
• Do I pay the people who provide insight? If not, is there any form of value exchange?
• Am I aware of the power-differences during any collaborative process? Am I working towards mitigating them?
• In any collaborative process am I mindful of triggers? Can I ask survivors about their triggers in advance so that I know what to avoid?
• Do I have a plan on how to support survivors if they get activated during a collaborative process? Am I prepared to stop the process if needed?
• When interviewing survivors am I mindful of the potential re-traumatization that can happen when they share their trauma story?
• In spaces with many survivors (e.g. co-design spaces), am I mindful of trauma collisions?
• Do I ensure the privacy of the people I’m working with?
• In the case of AI, am I listening to the concerns of the people who are affected the most?

Empowerment, Voice, and Choice

• Is my design empowering or disempowering people?
• Is my design elevating the voices of survivors?
• How are abusive voices managed in my design? Are they silenced? Are there clear rules and guidelines that cover those cases in advance?
• Does the design provide meaningful choices to the people who use it? Does it avoid meaningless choices?
• Am I practicing consentful tech? Are the choices a person makes reversible?
• Are important choices easy to find? Are they explicitly communicated?
• Whenever possible, is personal information requested in a way that provides choices? (E.g. “preferred name” instead of “legal name”, “pronouns” field instead of “male/female” picker.)
• Am I actively resisting making my design addictive?
• Is power taken under consideration in the design process? How are power differences in the research process mitigated?
• When practicing co-design, is the power shared among all the co-designers? Do co-designers have decision making power? (Are we co-deciding?)
• When practicing co-design, are we mindful of the power differences between the co-designers?
• Am I able to speak up in my organization? What happens when I speak truth to power?
• In the case of AI, are people given choices around how their data are being used to train models?

Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues

• Is my design sensitive to the intersectionality of trauma and marginalization?
• Am I actively seeking for the perspective of people with under-represented or marginalized identities? Am I asking who’s missing?
• Does my design make the lives of people with marginalized identities better?
• Is my design accessible?
• Is my design using inclusive language and imagery?
• Am I unlearning colonial ways of thinking? Am I decolonizing my work? Am I searching for frameworks that are not centered on western ways of knowing and doing?
• Am I political enough? Can I be more political? Am I intentional about the ways in which I am political?
• Am I feminist? How can my design incorporate ideas from feminist theories?
• Is my design challenging systems of oppression?
• Am I aware of my positionality? Am I exploring my own biases?
• Am I working with an organization that actively engages with DEI work?
• In the case of AI, how can I make the models more inclusive or, when that’s not possible, use them in a more inclusive way?

PS: Since it’s pride month, here’s a really good article on queering design.