Talk
Workshop

Evidence of Care

Service design often speaks of empathy and human-centeredness, but care is harder to see. Drawing from the helping professions and trauma-informed practice, this talk asks what evidence would show that care was actually present – in our methods, teams, decisions, boundaries, and the systems we leave behind.

Self

Field

Format

Talk

Day

Thursday, Oct 15

Room

Auditorium

Time

10:30

Care should not remain an intention, value, or feelingIt should leave evidence

Service design often relies on the language of empathy, participation, and human-centeredness to demonstrate that people matter. But good intentions do not necessarily create safe, ethical, or caring conditions. Care becomes meaningful when it is made visible through the choices we make: how people are prepared, how consent is negotiated, how much agency they retain, how boundaries are respected, how responsibility is distributed, and what happens when something goes wrong.

Drawing from the helping professions, trauma-informed practice, and public service, this talk introduces evidence of care as a way to examine not only what we design, but the conditions under which design happens. It asks us to look beyond individual kindness and consider whether care has been built forward into our methods, teams, decisions, and institutions.

Why is this conversation important now?

Designers are working amid accelerating technology, institutional instability, shrinking resources, professional exhaustion, and increasing pressure to move quickly. At the same time, practitioners are being asked to engage people whose lives may already be shaped by uncertainty, trauma, exclusion, or repeated encounters with systems that have failed them.

In these conditions, care can easily become symbolic: something expressed through language but unsupported by time, authority, boundaries, or accountability. The burden of making a process feel humane is then quietly transferred (or worse, explicitly offloaded) to individual practitioners, participants, or the most caring person in the room.

This conversation matters now because service design needs a more rigorous and accountable way to understand its human consequences. If we claim that our work is caring, ethical, or human-centered, we should be able to identify the evidence and notice and name when it is absent.

Who is this session for?

This session is for service designers, researchers, strategists, design leaders, public interest technologists, and anyone responsible for shaping experiences within complex systems. It will be especially relevant to practitioners who are questioning whether familiar human-centered methods adequately account for trauma, power, practitioner wellbeing, and the consequences of design.

Key takeaways

A clearer distinction between care as an intention and care as infrastructure
A way to recognize the visible and invisible labor that makes design processes feel safe
Questions for examining how consent, agency, boundaries, power, accountability, and repair appear in their work
A broader understanding of practitioner wellbeing as part of ethical design quality, rather than a separate issue
A practical invitation to look for evidence of care in their services, teams, methods, and organizational decisions
Most importantly, participants will leave with a different question to bring into their practice: What would demonstrate that care was actually present here?

Care Cartography: Mapping Where Care Lives

Care is often carried invisibly by individuals rather than built into systems. In this hands-on session, participants will map a real service, project, or team to identify where care is supported, offloaded, interrupted, or absent, and leave with one concrete intervention to strengthen the conditions around their work.

Self

Field

Format

Workshop

Day

Thursday, Oct 15

Room

Auditorium

Time

3:00 pm

Care can be mapped

When a service or design process feels humane, safe, or supportive, that experience is rarely accidental. It is produced through a collection of decisions about preparation, pacing, consent, agency, boundaries, communication, responsibility, support, accountability, repair, and endings.

Yet this work is often difficult to see. Care may be informally carried by one practitioner, added after a process has already been designed, or quietly offloaded onto participants, frontline workers, and the people with the least power to change the conditions around them.

In this hands-on session, participants will create a Care Cartography map of a real service, project, or team. They will identify:

Where care has been intentionally built into the work
Where care depends on invisible or uncompensated labor
Where responsibility is unclear, transferred, or offloaded
Where people have meaningful choice and where their agency narrows
Where boundaries, support, and accountability are present or absent
What happens when harm, rupture, or unintended consequences occur
Where one practical change could create stronger conditions of care
The purpose is not to judge whether a project is ‘caring.’ It is to make the conditions surrounding the work more visible so that participants can make more deliberate and accountable choices.

Why is this conversation important now?

Designers are being asked to work faster, navigate greater uncertainty, adopt emerging technologies, and address increasingly complex social and institutional problems. Within these conditions, care is often treated as a personal quality rather than a shared practice or organizational responsibility.

The people who notice distress, slow a process down, clarify expectations, prepare participants, repair relationships, or protect a team’s boundaries may be doing essential design work. Yet this labor frequently remains invisible, unsupported, and dependent on individual capacity.

At the same time, familiar service design tools are often better at mapping journeys, interactions, processes, and pain points than they are at revealing who absorbs the emotional, relational, and ethical consequences of the work.

Care Cartography offers participants a way to make those conditions visible. This matters because we cannot strengthen, protect, resource, or take responsibility for forms of care that remain invisible and unnamed.

Who is this session for?

This session is for service designers, researchers, strategists, design leaders, public interest technologists, and anyone responsible for shaping experiences within complex systems. It will be especially relevant to practitioners who are questioning whether familiar human-centered methods adequately account for trauma, power, practitioner wellbeing, and the consequences of design.

Key takeaways

A completed Care Cartography map of a real service, project, or team
A practical method for examining care across a design process or service experience
A clearer distinction between care that is structurally supported and care that depends on individual effort
Greater awareness of where emotional, relational, and ethical labor is being carried or offloaded
Prompts for examining consent, agency, pacing, boundaries, power, support, accountability, repair, and endings
One concrete intervention they can bring back to their work

Most importantly, participants will leave better equipped to ask not only, ‘Where is the evidence of care?’ but also, ‘Who is currently responsible for producing it, and what would it take to build that care forward?’

Rachael Dietkus

Rachael Dietkus

Founder @ Social Workers Who Design

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW, is a social worker, designer, public interest technologist, and founder of Social Workers Who Design. For more than two decades, her work has explored the intersection of trauma, care, design, technology, and public systems.

As the first social worker-designer with the White House at the U.S. Digital Service and a former leader in federal service design, Rachael has worked across government, healthcare, higher education, philanthropy, and social impact organizations to help teams better understand the human consequences of the systems they create and navigate. Her work focuses on trauma-informed design, ethical research and innovation practices, organizational well-being, and building cultures of care during times of uncertainty.

A sought-after speaker and educator, Rachael challenges conventional narratives about efficiency, innovation, and impact, inviting practitioners to consider what becomes possible when care is treated as essential infrastructure. She is writing a book on trauma and design with MIT Press.