SAFENESS BY DESIGN:
A Predisposition

Since 2019, Safeness by Design has been using research and design innovation to provoke conversations that may direct the creation of safer urban environments.

Design has the potential to significantly improve safety, reduce risk and save lives, either during the design phase, or through targeted design interventions. The broad user-centred skills and materials and manufacturing knowledge base of designers allows the potential for clear problem definition using ethnographic discovery processes, creative design, and innovative technical resolution in a socio-technical context.

Safeness by Design, an initiative emerging from RMIT University’s School of Design, aims to enhance health, wellbeing, and social values by using design to achieve actual and evident safeness across a broad range of environments and contexts. Rather than a design specialisation, this forms a generalist and multidisciplinary approach to realise social impact through a safeness agenda. We advocate designers using their understanding of user behaviour and situational contexts to identify and respond to safeness concerns through design proposals and interventions.

Previously, in three collaborative research projects between designers at RMIT School of Design and the planners and strategists from the cities of Barcelona and Melbourne, Safeness by Design developed design proposals that embrace holistic and multidisciplinary approaches to the issues of safety in the city on personal, social, spatial, and technological levels.

Enabling an Ageing Workforce has facilitated a move away from urban contexts into new areas of contribution.

To continue the varied nature and application of ‘Safeness by Design’ and Social Innovation - an exciting investigation into the field of Digital Health in the second half of 2022, has aligned 2023’s direction to partner with various collaborators, such as: RMIT’s Activator, Digital Health CRC, and Sensing and Wearables Network (with a few more in the wings).

There has been a large push toward digital health, which is a rapidly emerging field of study at the intersection of healthcare and digital technologies.

Digital technologies are now integral to daily life, and the world’s population has never been more interconnected. Innovation, particularly in the digital sphere, is happening at unprecedented scale. Even so, its application to improve the health of populations remains largely untapped, and there is immense scope for use of digital health solutions.

Digital health will be an integral part in the health priorities of humanity and as such, should benefit people in a way that is ethical, safe, secure, reliable, equitable and sustainable. It should also be developed with principles of transparency, accessibility, scalability, replicability, interoperability, privacy, security and confidentiality. (WHO)

Where safeness plays a major role, is in the appropriate use of digital health.  It takes the following dimensions into consideration: health promotion and disease prevention, patient safety, ethics, interoperability, intellectual property, data security (confidentiality, integrity, and availability), privacy, cost-effectiveness, patient engagement, and affordability. It should be people-centred, trust-based, evidence-based, effective, efficient, sustainable, inclusive, equitable and contextualized. The growing global challenge of digital waste on health and the environment must also be appropriately managed. (WHO)

How can design and new technologies address unanticipated complexity of a future facing population and innovate new solutions that imply conceptual, process, product, or organisational change, which ultimately aims to improve the welfare and wellbeing of individuals and communities?

Program leaders:
Mr William Dim
Professor Ian de Vere
Mr Jacob Sheahan
Associate Professor Ross McLeod
Dr Malte Wagenfeld

School of Design, RMIT University