What is Design Care?

Design Care is a framework for embedding care as an operational and ethical principle across public interest design, research, and service delivery. It offers a practical orientation to supervision, scope of practice, and team wellbeing—ensuring that care isn’t performative, but a practiced standard.

Design Care goes beyond aesthetics, surface-level ethics, or well-intentioned wellness programs. It addresses how decisions, roles, relationships, and unspoken norms shape our work—and the people affected by it.

This framework centers responsibility not just for what we design, but how we show up in the work: how we supervise, how we hold boundaries, how we define harm, and how we build cultures that support resilience without relying on individual heroics.

Origins

Design Care emerged from a sustained practice of trauma-informed design in civic and institutional contexts. After years of witnessing how care was invoked without infrastructure—and how standards and supervision were absent in high-stakes environments—it became clear that something deeper was needed.

Design Care is rooted in social work ethics, systems thinking, and participatory design. It is a framework for guiding teams, leaders, and institutions through the ongoing work of practicing care responsibly, especially when stakes are high and time is short.

This is not a framework for individual self-care. It’s for teams and institutions who want to build scaffolding for care, so that it’s shared, sustainable, and not just aspirational.

What Design Care Addresses

Supervision: Embedding reflective, trauma-informed, and context-aware supervision into design and research workflows.

1. Scope of Practice: Defining professional boundaries and ethical responsibilities, especially in interdisciplinary teams.

2. Standards of Care: Establishing clear norms, protocols, and principles that go beyond vibes and intention.

3. Codes of Care & Ethics: Building field-level accountability tools that adapt social work ethics to design and civic tech.

4. Relational Infrastructure: Designing for safety, transparency, and support—especially in environments marked by precarity or power asymmetries.

The CARE Framework

A practical structure for embedding relational ethics and stewardship into design and research practices.

Pillars

• Contextual Awareness: Understanding histories, power dynamics, and community realities shaping the work.

• Accountable Practice: Building internal and peer-based structures for reflection, feedback, and ethical growth.

• Relational Boundaries: Defining and maintaining scope, supervision, and safe containers—especially across roles and disciplines.

• Ethical Endurance: Preparing for the long-term: building team norms and standards that can withstand stress, turnover, and mission drift.

Elements

1. Scope Mapping: Identify role boundaries and escalation pathways across multidisciplinary teams

2. Supervision as Design: Create reflective, care-based supervision models for research and delivery.

3. Codes of Care: Develop organization-wide agreements and ethical guidelines rooted in equity and accountability.

4. Design for Debriefing: Establish processing protocols for emotionally heavy or high-stakes work.

5. Resilience Infrastructure: Design team health systems that support care without martyrdom.