Trauma Informed Design
Author: Wendy Elford Issue: 2024-05-01
Trauma Informed Design
by Wendy Elford
Lately I have been reading a bit about anxiety, fear, risk, uncertainty, and always, about all things design. It’s a habit that I take up now and then and always one that delivers huge value.
The concept of being ‘trauma informed’ comes up a lot in my world of human-centred design. It seems that as humans, everywhere we wander we can be challenged by the sensory inputs that we receive and how we perceive them. When we work through near automatic states of anxiety and fear, we end up with a less than ideal result, and we experience a lot of misery in the process.
Some of the books I’m reading include ‘Rewire your anxious brain’, ‘Radical risk’, ‘Uncertainty’ by Jonathan Field, and ‘Get out of your mind and into your life’. There are many others I circle back to.
So, the basis of this idea of trauma informed design is that our responses to our environment and the situations we encounter are learned through exposure to the world, leading to what we perceive as trauma. Designers counter the impact by actively reducing our exposure to the things that they have learned, through their experience and research, traumatise us.
Trauma informed design gives us the choice to avoid experiencing triggers or to ensure we never encounter at least the most dangerous ones until we either have the skills or equipment to deal with them.
What triggers us as humans varies a lot with our upbringing, which is the point about having a very reassuring first three to seven years of life so that we don’t jump at the next thing we don’t expect. Start your exploration here with self-regulation and the circle of safety. The idea is that by being nurtured by others through these early “traumas” we learn to perceive them as satisfied by nurturing humans. A wider range of sensory experiences become interesting or at least to we learn to distinguish between the ones that our context sensitive and wiser peers have learned are really are dangerous from those situations that are useful or at least might become useful in the future. Without this social trust or at least trust in your ability to pick up what is and is not dangerous in a range of environments and situations, being curious and learning is difficult if not impossible.
Which means those of us who are a little bit of the Nervous Nelly type can actually become more alert and aware to what’s happening now or emerging on the horizon than others. Think canary in the coal mine. Anxiety or even an early demise is the price you pay for this ability. If you are one of those gifted with the blessings and curses of anxiety, mental health may not be your strong suit. Yet you might be off the charts on perception and creativity.
Some of us are wired to be so perceptive that everything is interesting and we’re not able to focus on any one thing. This is where we might think of a range, a spectrum of people from needing to order and control everything just to make our worlds work moment to moment, to those people who are far more jumpy and unstable, responding to over imagination or to other people who are compulsively driven to fix what is actually not a problem again and again. You might even know someone with a looser grip on who they are, seeing them flip between different personalities and versions of themselves or between different states of energy.
We are all different and differences are seen as the context changes. We are all, at some level, Neurospicy people in a situation that is threateningly new. The ability to be able to safely and fully experience variety is critical to being fully alive to opportunity and resilience as a human.
And then there are people who are so comfortable that nothing is perceived as trauma but no change is expected either. We can’t anticipate or plan if we don’t have imagination. Ground Hog Day is not really living. An extreme version of ‘numbness’ is the extreme integration of perception, of being so Zen about the world that equanimity is a consistent experience and experience itself disappears.
Imagination is a human capability that none of us living in an ever-changing world can afford to lose. Anticipation keeps us alive and growing as humans. It’s our “edge” and also our downfall.
So my take on trauma informed design for myself is about rewiring me so that I can be in multiple environments. I learn to pick up through acquiring greater sensitivity to what’s going on. I slowed down to speed up. Ironically, when I walk towards the sensation that’s uncomfortable, I make more sense of what’s going on than I would if I was super anxious or so chilled I fool myself into believing that nothing was worth noticing.
So how does these sensory challenges fit with trauma informed design?
I like to create and redesign the environments around me again and again so that I learn to be assured I can choose to be at ease neurologically anywhere.
Strangely that means learning to be uncomfortable and so working outdoors is part of that. Think outdoor office. The idea is that I can settle myself and cold is not the problem I thought it was nor the wind nor the sun. It gives me a much greater range of places that I can ease myself into, not wall myself away from. Gradually, I learn to experience the world more fully.
Strangely, this approach seeks to make me more compassionate, more curious about what’s going on for other people in the spaces, places, and experiences we share.
I often go back to Stuart Shanker’s work on self-regulation. It’s not possible for us to force through design everything in our individual or shared worlds to fully account for our traumas or the traumas of others. Trauma is person specific. Perception of past trauma can and should shift overtime if we have enough new experiences and work on reframing our lifelong collection of experiences. It’s a creative act and lifetime pursuit.
Yet active design is always about choice and change; change may not always be comfortable and the discomfort forces you to notice and learn.
Choosing to stage your experience of discomfort is smart, though shock immersion is sometimes useful. You might need to avoid really noisy or really bright places until you’ve got the skills to handle them through little shocks you can recover from or to mitigate noise or light with a little simple equipment.
Earplugs anyone? I remember the first time I started walking around a city wearing earplugs. Finally, I could be comfortable people-watching. I laughed at myself. I could use my eyes more easily because the noise of the place wasn’t pushing me away. The flipside of that would be to wear an eye mask and sit in a civic square and just concentrate on learning to listen into the noise.
So my view here is to develop the habit of curiosity by learning not to be traumatised so much; by constantly experiencing variety. To be always seeking out different temperatures, different amounts of light, differing amounts of sound and heat, different levels of exertion and then to lean into whatever the changes that could be my past “trauma”.
At first I believed it was illogical to push levels of discomfort. Trauma informed design for me is now more about learning that it isn’t actually trauma, that it’s my learning edge to confirm or gradually to widen my tolerance window for certain sets of conditions, all the while knowing when to come back from disorder and how to regenerate.
…. and for that, it’s also much easier when you are among friends. Just giving a moment of gratitude to my colleagues and partners in crime in OGM and wider spaces.
Related:
- Wendy Elford (author)
- 2024 (year)
- Topics: Health and Wellbeing