Design is care (and sensing carelessness)
There was a pivotal moment during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics that still sticks in my mind. Directed by Danny Boyle, it featured a prominent section dedicated to the National Health Service. The NHS.
Importantly, this segment featured NHS patients and staff. The most iconic moment was an illuminated NHS logo filling a large section of the newly opened Olympic Stadium. This could be seen as the camera panned out to a spectacular aerial view of the scene. It was an extraordinary moment that celebrated both the NHS and public service delivery as one of our greatest achievements in British society and culture.
I often think of this example. How that 2012 opening ceremony was a time and moment of great optimism, and it continues to feel important that public service delivery was at the very heart of that celebration and moment of national pride.
If we fast forward 13 years from that moment, I want to use this post to share some examples that make me think about care as a continued part of our national story. Specifically, how we should think about care as part of public service delivery today, and especially with an increasing need for us to respond with care when working with new and emerging technologies.
Context as care
Travelling around the country, I often see these posters by the Samaritans – the charity that provides support to anyone in emotional distress, struggling to cope or at risk of suicide.
These posters are a brilliant example of care which you will find at railway stations and placed deliberately in other locations like walkways over motorway bridges. They’re important. Not just because of what they say. But because they’re in places like these where they matter most. They use plain language and reassuring messaging at the moment someone might most need to hear it.
Someone has thought carefully about the need for these posters. In this situation, good design is about understanding that context. It’s care. It’s design and thoughtful signposting to a service that will save lives.
Careless people
In contrast, there are design choices today that cost lives and cause great damage to communities, places and people. We often recognise these choices more as business models, especially in the world of tech and AI, but they are by design.
In the past few months, I’ve been drawn to the word ‘careless’ when thinking about the challenges faced by our public services and society. This is especially the case with the framing around the impact of technology in our lives, and increasingly the big bets being made around AI to drive efficiency and productivity.
The word careless can be defined as the failure to give sufficient attention to avoiding harm or errors. Put simply, carelessness can be described as ‘negligence’.
I also read the recently published book Careless People: A story of where I used to work by Sarah Wynn-Williams. It was interesting to see how this book went so mainstream. I found it in my local supermarket, and much of the press around the book has been amplified by Meta’s attempt to stop its publication. Mark Zuckerberg does not want you to read this book.
I thought Careless People was shocking on many levels. One of many examples Sarah Wynn-Williams’ describes is how her colleagues – recognising the author was part of what happened inside Facebook, later Meta – used data to target young people when at their most vulnerable. Specifically targeting situations around body confidence in one example. It’s the story of a push for platform growth and market control at all costs. I was shocked but perhaps not surprised by what I read.
It was the title of the book itself that first caught my attention. Sarah Wynn-Williams takes this idea from The Great Gatsby – the 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoting directly:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
As Careless People sets out to explain, this represents just one story of power and greed with technology at the centre of who controls and runs the world in 2025 – the infrastructure of everything as I’ve described before on this blog.
Sensing care in design
It’s 6-years since Jony Ive left his role at Apple as Chief Design Officer and he’s most recently been back in the news as his studio is joining OpenAI in a reported $6.5bn deal.
Ive was recently interviewed by Stripe CEO Patrick Collisson, which can be watched back in full on Youtube. Although it’s rare he’s interviewed, the themes he spoke of were familiar to how I’ve heard him describe his work previously, especially in the context of the period of work with former Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Watching the interview back, I was struck by how he spoke about applying care to design, describing how:
“…everyone has the ability to sense the care in designed things because we can all recognise carelessness.”
Talking about the history of industrial design at Apple, Ive speaks about the care that went into the design of every product. That included the care that went into packaging – specifically things that might seem as inconsequential as how a cable was wrapped and then unpackaged. In reality, the type of small interactions that millions of people experienced when unboxing the latest iPhone. These are details that people wouldn’t see as such, but Ive and team believed that they would sense care when they had been carefully considered and designed.
This approach has always been a part of Jony Ive’s design philosophy, or the principles applied by his creative teams at Apple. I looked back and found an earlier 2015 interview and notes I’d made where he says how he believes that the majority of our manufactured environment is characterised by carelessness. But then, how, at Apple, they wanted people to sense care in their products.
The attention to detail and the focus and attention we can all bring to design is care. It’s important.
Systems of care for systems that care
Another of the ways I describe good design is in how we don’t lose sight of what makes us human.
The NHS is just one example of an interconnected system of organisations which is full of technology choices that shape real human experiences, frustrations, and points of failure.
I think that everyone has a health story of IT failure related to themselves, their children, parents or friends. Systems that haven’t been designed, considered, or cared for in ways that recognise the real impact they have on people.
With this example, I’m not talking about the brilliant people delivering care across organisations in the NHS. But you can often sense carelessness when you’re trying to book an appointment, or trying to get an update on your referral.
You can sense carelessness through a lack of data interoperability, with the workarounds, and the reliance on analogue processes or additional interventions to ensure people’s needs are met appropriately in the immediate moment. This is throughout touch points that happen from being admitted to hospital and through until the point of being discharged or referred on to other parts of the system – including the many layers of support provided within communities and through not-for-profit organisations. Most of all, people tasked with delivering care will also sense carelessness in the IT systems and solutions they have to use and adapt their work around every day.
To point to a final story, which is another Apple story …I remember reading in the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson how frustrated Jobs was when in hospital towards the end of his life having cancer treatment. He didn’t like the medical devices he was attached to or the design of instruments being used to treat him. Having spent his life investing in producing the best seamless industrial design, he could sense the carelessness around him despite having access to some of the best care in the US health system.
Care in how we design and implement future technology
My hope is that people don’t end up sensing carelessness in the things we design and deliver.
The care needed is in the decisions, solutions and change that we help shape. It’s the research we plan and conduct. It’s how we prototype, test and evaluate new ways of working, and how we choose to make progress working alongside people who will be most impacted by change.
There are already plenty of reported problematic use cases of AI being used to make decisions and automate processes in government. Here’s one example from as far back as 2023, in which the Guardian referenced evidence of tools that had the potential to produce discriminatory results: UK officials use AI to decide on issues from benefits to marriage licences. It’s also not the level of care society deserves to simply argue that these tools and technologies will improve exponentially over time.
What is increasing over time is the available research published about the impact of AI in areas such as automated decision-making. To reference a new book I’ve found helpful, these are both design questions and ethical questions. They demand a point of view and care in how we implement and use emerging technologies…
Taken from a shared extract from the book The AI Con:
“Government processes that affect people’s liberty, health, and livelihoods require human attention and accountability […] shunting consequential tasks to black-box machines trained on always-biased historical data is not a viable solution for any kind of just and accountable outcome.”
The AI Con, Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
There is carelessness in how some new technologies are already impacting people’s lives, specifically through the equity of outcomes and experiences they are shaping across a range of public services. While I don’t agree with arguments that we just shouldn’t use AI tools or these technologies, there are important questions about what it means to design human systems in ways that continue to best connect and serve others.
Care as a new national story
As designers, care is the focus and attention we can bring to work. It’s the effort we can apply to ensure our organisations make the best use of new technologies, but only in ways that support a better, more equal society. This starts with being prepared to ask the right questions.
Design is care, and the experiences we shape and deliver will be defined by how people sense that care in the future.
Stories like the NHS in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics matter. If we succeed, it will also mean that we continue to create a sense of national pride in our public institutions and what they should stand for. Care.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.