Our work has unquestionable reach and impact – but does it always have the positive impact we intended?
We’re learning more and more about the negative impacts of technology such as addiction, manipulation, bias, excessive energy consumption and information overload every day.
So as responsible designers how might we minimise the risks of these harms resulting from our work?
Here’s an idea.
Imagine if we deliberately designed things to have a net positive impact on the world?
I think that design principles can be a useful tool to help us to do just this.
Design principles help us to make our intentions clear, keep us on the right track and to set the right tone without being too prescriptive.
Originally I set out to create some ‘sustainable design principles’ but being sustainable – (i.e. doing no harm) is no longer enough.
Instead, we must strive for our work to be ‘regenerative’ – doing ‘more good than harm’.
So here’s my first draft of some regenerative design principles.
I’ve written them with digital services in mind so you might need to tweak them to suit your own context.
Use them to help you design better services that benefit people, the economy and the environment.
As ever, I’d welcome any comments and suggestions to improve them.
Please use, modify and share as you wish.
Cheers!
1. Integrity first
- Respect people’s attention, data and privacy
- Do not manipulate, mislead or exploit people
- Be transparent about your environmental impact so people can make informed choices about using your service
2. Include everyone
- Ensure your service can be used by the widest possible range of people
- Actively identify who is excluded and under-represented and seek to include them
3. Elegant simplicity
- Make your service as simple, lightweight and as easy to use as possible
- Aim to do more with less by delivering maximum value from the minimum input of materials, resources and energy
4. Learn and adapt
- Work to deeply understand and meticulously serve the needs of your users and stakeholders
- Learn from actual real-world use of your service and continually adapt and improve it to meet ever changing user needs, behaviours and requirements
5. Collaborate and share
- Share your successes, failures and resources as openly as possible.
- Actively contribute to shared knowledge, standards and tools helps the whole system to learn from everyone else
6. Be ‘net positive’
- Aim to leave things in a better state than you found them
- Create measurable benefits for people, the economy and the environment
7. Think global, act local
- Understand how your service impacts wider social, economic and environmental systems and minimise any unintended consequences that you may contribute towards
- Do what you can with what you can control. Every incremental improvement will make a difference
8. Build for the long term
- Ensure your service is resilient, adaptable and easy to maintain
- Prioritise repair and reuse over replacement
- Enable responsible decommissioning of services, ensuring data is portable and service users can easily leave
James Chudley 