SAFENESS by DESIGN: A NEW DESIGN PARADIGM?

Abstract

Design has the potential to significantly improve safeness and wellbeing, and to identify and reduce risk either during the design phase or through targeted design interventions concerning product, infrastructure, systems, and services. The broad user-centred skills and technical knowledge base of designers allows for clear problem definition using ethnographic discovery processes, and creative design and innovative design resolution in a socio-technical context. As designers’ transition from product dependent (and market driven) outcomes to fewer tangible activities, increasingly the role of design as an enabler of societal wellbeing, capable of making a greater contribution to communities and lifestyles, opens up new practice foci. Whilst design has always been required to address safety from a compliance and/or product liability perspective, ‘Safeness by Design’ aims to apply an explicit safeness lens to design practice. Aspirational in its intent, it seeks to operate outside of safety compliance frameworks; utilising human centred design, experience and interaction design, social design, and service design approaches, rather than risk management methodologies, to achieve actual or perceived safeness. This paper suggests Safeness by Design as a new design paradigm, examining the contribution of early works to safer urban contexts, and proposes a safeness-led approach to design practice.