Pro-Social on Trauma-Informed Design: A Recap

At PDN we're guilty, along with many in our field, of using the term "users" to describe people on platforms, which has a way of letting us forget that they are actually individuals who each come to online spaces with rich histories. Those histories, as Sarita Schoenebeck explained at our latest Pro Social, most often include some type of trauma. 

That awareness, however, is at the center of taking a Trauma Informed approach to design, along with the stand that platform designers should care about the people they design for.

Trauma Informed Design draws its theory from Social Work and, as its name suggests, focuses on reducing trauma from occurring or past trauma from being retriggered online. But its six principles create a framework for broadly thinking about prosocial design, not just for those at risk of trauma. Dr. Schoenebeck walked us through those six principles:

• Safety. Like most other approaches to prosocial design, it all starts with people knowing that they - and their data - are safe.
• Trust and transparency. Transparency means being sure people know "what will be done, by whom and when" when they are moving through a justice system. We're familiar with how that transparency applies to those who platforms say have broken rules, but the same holds for people who report harmful behavior.
• Peer support. Providing access to others with similar experiences is a fundamental part of social work; in the online context, it can mean not only providing spaces for peer support, but ensuring additional privacy protections in those spaces.
• Collaboration: In social work, plans for support are designed collaboratively with the person receiving the support; in platform design, that could translate into giving people control of how to protect against (re)trauma - for example, indicating what types of content they do not want to see.
• Empowerment. Closely related to collaboration, empowerment gives people choice over their online experience.

When we turned to practical applications, Sarita shared examples of "light lift" and more tech-demanding ways platforms should be designed with trauma in mind. We focused on an area of her work, Non-consensual Intimate Content (NCIC) - images or other content that depict a person's body without their consent that, especially with GenAI's ability to fabricate intimate content by merely using a person's face, present a growing risk of trauma. 

As an initial - and necessary step - Sarita says platforms should institute better reporting systems, making it easier for people to tell platforms "this is content of me and I don't want it there". Following the principles of "Trust and Transparency", that process should keep people updated on the status of their report and a platform's actions. 

As a more proactive measure, Sarita and her colleagues have also developed a tool, "Hands Off", that prevents people from taking screenshots of potential NCIC by forcing them to make a gesture with their two hands to, for example, see a protected image. Thinking creatively about other ways to introduce friction and reinforce norms around privacy can likewise reduce the incidence of NCIC being shared. In the end, a Trauma Informed approach recognizes that it cannot eliminate all trauma, but any reduction is win.

Watch the full conversation with Sarita below. And see her papers with colleagues going into more depth on trauma-informed design and Hands Off.

About the Prosocial Design Network

The Prosocial Design Network researches and promotes prosocial design: evidence-based design practices that bring out the best in human nature online. Learn more at prosocialdesign.org.