Description

Trust is a thread that weaves through almost every area of our life. It is comforting when it works and can be catastrophic when it doesn’t.

As design increasingly transforms our relationship with finance, food, media, public space and more, designers must acknowledge their due responsibility. This begins with the responsibility to increase trust.

Obvious questions arise when contemplating design and trust – how can trust be made a function of design? What are the ingredients for trust in design? Can you design trust?

The core mechanics of trust and those of design are closer than most imagine. Sociologist Marek Kohn’s recipe for the two basic conditions of a trusting relationship in his book Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good offers a succinct starting point:

1. The party being trusted will incorporate the trusting party’s interests into its own.
2. The party being trusted is capable of the actions required.

Layering design terminology onto these conditions for trust, we find that they are aligned with basic notions of design values and functionality:

• The party being trusted to ‘incorporate the trusting party’s interests into their own’ is a statement that the values of the two parties must be aligned for trust to occur.
• The condition that ‘the party being trusted is capable of the actions required’ is a statement that expectations of functionality must be satisfied as a condition of trust.

With design values and functionality aligned with conditions for trust, the next question moves to a more common area of focus – design aesthetics.

While the conditions necessary for trust and the criteria to assess it in design coalesced around distinct themes during research, more traditional considerations of aesthetics did not appear as clearly. Qualities necessary for trust fall outside traditional design metrics. For example, ‘humor’ was one unexpected quality that many people found to be a building block of trust. The extension of vulnerability and resolution during the ‘set up’ and ‘pay off’ inherent to humor worked with the same principles as the resolution of vulnerability during a trusted transaction.

Many words and associations began to define the design characteristics central to trust –  truth, clarity, simplicity, understanding, traceability, relevancy, honesty, and sustainability, among others. When the topic of trust was posed to designers, existing toolkits and terminology weren’t sufficient. Conversations almost always veered into new design language.