Draft Release - Cultivating a trauma responsive design practice

Here at Portable we recognise the importance of respectfully learning from the lived experience of others to help guide our design outputs and create products, services, and experiences that better respond to the needs of those we seek to support. 

 Having completed countless projects across mental health over the past few years, members of our team questioned whether human-centred design frameworks provided the space necessary to support those with lived experience of trauma.

 In an effort to build an understanding of trauma, interpersonal trauma, and how we can minimise the risk of harm in people with lived experience, our team embarked on a Research & Development project to discover how we can better practice trauma responsive design.

We are giving those in our network the exclusive opportunity to gain early access to the insights and findings from our ongoing research, with the hope that your feedback will help human-centred designers build their knowledge about trauma and continue their learning towards becoming trauma responsive designers.

For more information about our research, we recommend visiting the articles linked below:

• What is trauma responsive design?
• Pausing to reflect on how our work impacts people

And for those of you who are ready to begin your journey toward becoming a trauma responsive designer, we are also providing access to our trauma responsive design prototype which features foundational information alongside practical activities and scenarios which aim to help designers practically build their trauma responsive design practice by following the link below:

• Portable's Trauma Responsive Design Prototype

We look forward to receiving your feedback regarding our ongoing research and hope that together we can work to help designers everywhere better practice trauma responsive design.