Designers craft services, products and systems which permeate society and are used by everyone. Design processes also impact the lives of the people they touch, directly and indirectly. From an interview which can elicit trauma to designing a product which shapes the way a person behaves. The design sector is consistently impacted by Silicon Valley’s mantra ‘move fast and break things’. This has led to wicked problems for global communities including echo-chambers, polarization, addiction to social media and dark patterns. With the privilege and power of practicing design, as designers we need to be aware of our responsibilities towards the systems and people we design for and with, and begin assessing more nuanced and complex ethical discussions.
‘Do no harm’ is the Hippocratic oath guiding healthcare physicians to “be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future” and to have two approaches towards their field, “to do good or to do no harm”. Design, unlike healthcare, does not have a shared set of ethical guidelines which can hold the practice accountable toward designing responsibly. When contextualized within design practice, Do No Harm does not mean to ‘do nothing’. It means to avoid exposing people to additional risks through the designers’ actions. The intention is to take a step back from an intervention, understand the broader context and mitigate potential negative effects that might impact the social fabric of our societies, economies and environments.
In this talk, we will introduce the ‘Do No Harm framework for design’, a practical approach to support design practitioners to start considering and applying ethics in projects and across the design process. After an introduction of the building blocks that constitute Do No Harm, followed by a combination of case studies and examples, we will unveil a few keys steps of the framework and its application.
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Pardis Shafafi
Dr. Pardis Shafafi is a British Iranian anthropologist and Strategic Design Lead and Head at Designit’s Oslo studio. She has over 15 years of cross-sectoral experience, ranging from scrubbing into clinical care and managing humanitarian programs in active war zones, to guiding diverse clients through complex diagnostics and planning for future-adapted business endeavours.
Dr. Pardis Shafafi continues to be active with think tanks and journals, advising on the European Union Off-Site project and teaching and supervising design students on Do No Harm and Anthropology.
Giulia Bazoli
Giulia Bazoli is a UX Lead that has been for the past 2 years a Diversity Equity and Inclusion champion at Designit Oslo. She has over 10 years of experience across user research and UX design, collaborating with organizations in the private and public sectors such as the UK Government, Spotify, and Cisco.
Giulia brings people-centricity to each of her projects, seeking every opportunity to elevate the standards for user research, embedding inclusive recruitment practices, and measuring the intentional and unintentional impact that the solutions we design have on people, communities and the environment.
