Welcome to Responsible Design. This framework includes a set of principles as well as methods we use to support those principles. It is, however, a work-in-progress, because something like responsible tech and design are moving targets. As circumstances, contexts and developments shift we have to constantly monitor if what we’re doing is still fitting for those changes.
Are you a designer? In that ****case, we want to share our work because we believe our approach and resources can be incorporated into designers’ daily work and be one impetus for more responsible technology.
Are you looking for a design team? In that case, you can explore the principles (and reasoning behind them), theories and mindsets by which Studio Llama strives to design. Maybe they are something you’d like incoorporated into your own projects.
Let us know what you think. We’d enjoy getting to know you and hear your thoughts over a cup of water, tea or coffee. We consider this to be a living document and are always open to feedback.
Content
How are we designing currently?
There isn’t just one way of designing. There isn’t even one clear definition of it. But one aspect seems relatively clear to us:
<aside> 🎯 Digital products are designed by focusing on users and their needs.
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That isn’t a bad thing. If applied correctly, it forces companies and organisations to focus on their users' needs instead of their own. This happens through a cycle of research, design work and validation, seeking direct input from potential users. But is it enough?
<aside> ⁉️ Despite the helpful focus of approaches like User-Centred Design (UCD), we have still witnessed the design of harmful products for users individually and societies globally.
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What is harmful about design & technology?
What are the issues related to design?
As a studio, we took the time to chat, tinker and think about what we felt was going wrong and how we might think to approach the problem. As a result, we identified three main issues with commonly-used approaches to digital design, like UCD, which helped us think about ways to address the issues we’ve been seeing - well, at least some of them.
Where does this leave us?
<aside> 🔦 We need to build and expand upon approaches that compliment or move beyond UCD to design more responsibly. This process requires new methods and processes.
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The design of technology has wide-ranging societal impacts. We use our criticisms to build on its foundations to workshop our framework for responsible design.
There are myriad alternate methods out there which we draw upon and incorporate. In addition, we workshop our own methods based on our fields of study and collective knowledge.
How did we get here?
Based on our conclusions above, our deep dive into researching design methods out there and combining our collective knowledge from design, psychology and anthropology, we have come up with our Studio Llama approach that aims to translate theories and possible methods into actual action. We hope to address some of the short comings that have been witnessed in the design world and “do good” (or at least better). As a studio, we continuously monitor new developments, remain open to inputs and stay connected. As a result, this approach will be updated as we go.
Our framework has three components:
<aside> Introduction & Deduction
That’s what you’re reading right now. 🙃
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<aside> 🚩 Principles
General approach for designing more responsibly.
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<aside> 🔧 Methods
Methods to carry the principles over into your daily design practice. They are mapped to the principles.
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Process & Framework
We set out to define a set of methods that could be neatly packaged into a “ResDes Process” which we could implement across design projects. That became difficult to do: project realities and foci are too different for an all-encompassing process. The “process” we can parse out is fairly bare-bones:
We believe the attitude and mindset need to be established at the outset so that we go into a project with more responsible intentions. Subsequently, the whole design process adapts to become more holistic and grounded (more on this in our principles). Finally, we incorporate future and impact-oriented thinking to take responsibility for outcomes and externalities.
→ Principles are here, right below.
→ Methods are here.
Why principles?
Since coming up with a preset set of methods for every design project is not possible, we developed principles that directly address the three shortcomings of colloquial design approaches today. The principles create a design ecosystem that strengthens responsible design beliefs, reasoning and decisions. The principles also guided our search for and development of methods that can be incorporated into design projects. As a result, we are able to focus on specific methods that directly link to our principles and should therefore address the shortcoming we see in common design approaches.
Overview
<aside> 🧠 Responsible Attitude and Mindset
We want to extend our design goals and intentions.
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Holistic and grounded
We redefine users & needs across stakeholders and societal levels.
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<aside> 🤖 Future and impact oriented
We take responsibility for the impact and actively explore futures.
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