Design Education• Design Research• Visual Design
How do you move trauma-informed care from a principle into a practice that designers can actually use?
Empathy is often held up as design's north star — the quality that keeps practice human-centered and innovation meaningful. But what happens when empathy becomes a buzzword? When it flattens the complexity of human experience, or worse, enables harm under the guise of altruism? Beyond Empathy, our MFA thesis at Parsons School of Design, sits with that discomfort and pushes further — toward a practice that honestly reckons with trauma, power, and care. The work ultimately argues that as the problems design addresses grow more complex, so must our relationship to empathy and treats it not as a step in a process, but as a restorative practice.
Key Outcomes
Conducted multi-method design research using interviews, probes, and visual artifacts to uncover how practitioners navigate trauma-informed practice.
Surfaced gaps, tensions, and opportunities within existing trauma-informed approaches.
Turned research into an interactive exhibit that invited practitioners to explore and contribute their own experiences.
Role: Design Researcher and Graphic Designer
Collaborators: Anna Pierce
Duration: 6 months | 2023
Context
Trauma-informed approaches have been quietly reshaping social work, public health, and education for decades. In design, however, the conversation was nascent, scattered across a handful of practitioners, white papers, and organizations working largely in isolation. We found ample theory and growing awareness, but almost no explicit documentation of how designers actually bridge trauma-informed care to trauma-informed practice. That unknown middle space - between knowing and doing - is exactly where we situated our work.
Challenge
Design researchers are, by nature, frontline workers — entering communities, holding difficult conversations, and sitting with people's most vulnerable experiences. Yet the field offered little guidance for what to do when a research session surfaced something painful, when a participant was retraumatized, or when the researcher themselves carried the weight of what they witnessed. The challenge wasn't awareness. It was translation: how do you move trauma-informed care from a principle into a practice that designers can actually use?
Research Process
To make the implicit explicit, to bridge the gap between trauma-informed theory and design practice, we developed an original research activity called Reflect & Record. The activity went through three iterations, moving from an asynchronous probe to a live conversational format, which proved far richer, giving participants space to go beyond the prompts and think out loud. It opens with a grounding/re-centering exercise, followed by asking the participants to define trauma-informed practice in their own words, and lastly share a real scenario in which trauma-informed practice showed up.
We spoke with a deliberately cross-disciplinary group: service and product designers, psychologists, social workers, community researchers, and qualitative practitioners across 4 organizations and 4 disciplines. Across 16 interviews and 7 asynchronous responses, we collected 30 practice-based scenarios and 22 distinct definitions of what trauma-informed practice actually means — evidence alone that the field has no shared language yet.
The themes that emerged were wide-ranging: transparency, designer positionality, cultural adaptation, vicarious trauma, ongoing consent, and what we came to call practicing practice — the idea that trauma-informed work is never finished, only deepened. What unified every conversation was this: to be in relationship with people in a design process is to risk doing harm.
Research Deliverables
Beyond Empathy produced a collection of 30 practice-based scenarios, 22 practitioner-defined definitions of trauma-informed practice, and a synthesized set of themes that together begin to map what this work looks like in motion. More than a catalog, the research surfaces a shared vocabulary the field has been missing — one that names vicarious trauma, ongoing consent, researcher positionality, and cultural adaptation as design concerns, not just psychological ones.
Wrap-up reports were single-page summaries combining story, themes, and open-ended reflection questions. Used by colleagues in teaching, curriculum planning, and internal research strategy. They included illustrated scenarios and practice-based definitions of what “trauma-informed” means in practice, drawn directly from the language and experience of participants.
A comprehensive research report expanded on the discourse of Design as a discipline as well as a critical review of some current methods used by designers.
Thesis Exhibition
We used flavor profiles as a metaphor to make trauma-informed design more approachable. Like flavors, the six SAMHSA principles can show up differently depending on the context. For example, safety might mean physical, digital, or emotional safety—just as sweetness might come from sugar, honey, or condensed milk.
Trauma-informed practice also varies in maturity, from Trauma Aware to Trauma Informed, much like the intensity of a flavor.
For the exhibit, each principle became an “ingredient” in a jar, with a short description of how it shows up in practice. Visitors could mix and match ingredients and take them home. “Recipes” were annotated transcripts showing how multiple principles come together in real-world situations.
Reflection
The project surfaced an honest tension: trauma-informed values like patience, collaboration, and relationship-building often clash with deadlines, funding constraints, and institutional protocols. We didn’t try to resolve that tension. We named it, and used it to imagine what the field might need next: discipline-specific tools, a practitioner maturity model, and a shared space for exchanging what actually works.
This work changed how I approach design, not just as a process of solving, but of translating, holding, and responding. It pushed me to rethink empathy as a design tool and explore more accountable ways of engaging with harm, care, and complexity.
Ultimately, Beyond Empathy taught me how to hold space for complexity and design processes that don’t flinch from it.