Human gestures in design ethics – A distinction between caring and manipulative design
As designers, we often discuss patterns, systems and interfaces, but rarely do we examine the fundamental human gestures that underpin our interactions.
These archetypal movements and responses shape how we connect with one another and, increasingly, how we connect with technology.
The origin of gestures
The framework of caring gestures of this text originates from the work of Rolf Heine, a certified nurse and anthroposophic nursing specialist who has made significant contributions to holistic nursing practices.
Heine’s original “12 nursing gestures” bridge inner attitudes with practical caregiving activities, categorised into two main types: enveloping (or substituting) and activating (or uplifting).
Enveloping Gestures:
- Cleansing: Assisting the true nature to emerge by removing impurities
- Nurturing: Providing sustenance and comfort
- Relieving: Alleviating discomfort or pain
- Protecting: Ensuring safety and shielding from harm
- Creating Order/Making Room: Organising the environment to promote clarity
- Enveloping: Offering warmth and security
- Balancing: Restoring equilibrium, both physically and emotionally
Activating Gestures:
- Stimulating: Encouraging activity or responsiveness
- Challenging: Motivating individuals to overcome limitations
- Awakening: Bringing awareness or alertness
- Affirming: Validating the individual’s feelings and experiences
- Supporting Uprightness: Promoting dignity and self-respect
I am sure you’ve already identified some that are very close to design language an philosophy. In anthroposophic nursing, these gestures guide practitioners to approach care as more than just physical treatment, but as a comprehensive engagement with the whole person.
The gestures create a structure for meaningful human interaction, acknowledging the dignity and autonomy of those receiving care.
Originally applied in settings like hospitals, elder care, and education (particularly in Waldorf/Steiner educational approaches), these gestures provide a vocabulary for discussing the quality of human interactions.
While working on a “What if” exploration with at Liminal Discovery, we began examining how fundamental human gestures translate into our world of design, technology and service development.
A framework for examining design work from an ethical perspective
We explored how these original twelve gestures might translate into our world of design, technology and service development. The parallel was striking—what are our digital products and services doing if not engaging in forms of care relationships with users?
By applying Heine’s framework directly to design contexts, we found new insights into how technology interfaces with fundamental human needs.
What emerged from our exploration was a three-part mapping that translates care gestures into the context of design and technology:
- Traditional meaning: The core human intention behind each gesture
- Digital manifestation: How these gestures appear in technology, culture, and product design
- Ethical tension: The contrast between caring implementation and potentially manipulative use
This framework offers designers a new vocabulary for examining how fundamental human interactions translate into digital experiences, revealing both the opportunities for genuine care and the risks of exploitation. Let me illustrate with several examples from our framework:
| Gesture | Traditional meaning | Digital manifestation | Ethical tension |
| Cleansing | Removing what is harmful or false to let the authentic emerge | Clear interfaces, content moderation, data cleanup, digital detox tools | Censorship, excessive control, over-sanitisation that suppresses diversity |
| Nurturing | Providing warmth, support, and resources | User onboarding, helpful notifications, inclusive design | Overprotectiveness, creating dependency, infantilising users |
| Relieving | Easing pain, discomfort, or pressure | Error recovery flows, frictionless UX, help systems | Avoidance of necessary complexity, deceptive ease masking ethical trade-offs |
| Protecting | Shielding from harm or danger | Privacy-by-design, encryption, safeguarding from dark patterns | Surveillance justified as protection, paternalism, removal of agency |
| Creating order / making room | Structuring chaos to create clarity and space | Information architecture, decluttering, filtering | Algorithmic gatekeeping, exclusion through design simplicity |
| Enveloping | Providing a sense of holding and safety | Ambient design, UI coherence, trustworthy branding | Manipulative trust design, over-familiar interfaces, “cosy” as camouflage |
| Balancing | Re-establishing harmony and proportion | Feedback loops, adaptable systems, emotional design | Predictive nudging that disempowers, false sense of control |
| Stimulating | Awakening curiosity or initiative | Gamification, playful elements, microinteractions | Addiction loops, exploitative engagement metrics |
| Challenging | Encouraging growth through difficulty | Stretch goals, creative constraints, feedback-rich environments | Overwhelming demands, gamified pressure, productivity anxiety |
| Awakening | Making someone conscious or aware | Notification systems, context-aware design, ambient feedback | Sensory overload, constant alerts, attention hijacking |
| Affirming | Recognising worth, validating experience | Personalisation, accessible UX, diverse representation | Echo chambers, over-validation, superficial feel-good features |
| Supporting uprightness | Upholding dignity, independence, and presence | Empowering tools, autonomy-first interfaces, consent flows | Fake empowerment, choice overload, performative ethics |
From theory to practice
What makes this framework valuable is how it connects deeply human experiences with technical implementation decisions. As designers, we can use these gestures as a lens to examine our work:
- Does our product listen to genuinely understand or to exploit?
- Do our systems wait for users, or do they manipulate timing to serve business needs?
- Is the affirmation we offer authentic, or is it designed primarily to drive engagement metrics?
- Are we accompanying users on their journey or creating dependencies?
- When we give, are we truly offering value or setting up extraction mechanisms?
By recognising these fundamental gestures in our design work, we can make more conscious choices about how we translate human care patterns into digital experiences. Each implementation decision can be evaluated not just for its functional impact but for its ethical alignment with genuine care.
I believe this framework has significant potential for guiding more ethical design decisions across our industry. It’s a work in progress, one I hope to develop further with input from others who care deeply about the human impact of our design choices.
What gestures do you recognise in your own design work? How might we collectively develop a more caring approach to technology design?
The human gestures in design framework – Download
This framework serves designers, design teams and educators seeking to examine the ethical dimensions of digital experiences through a human-centred lens:
It is for practicing designers who want to evaluate whether their work truly serves users or subtly manipulates them, providing a practical tool for making more conscious design decisions.
For design leaders and teams looking to align their products with genuine human care principles, offering a shared vocabulary for ethical discussions beyond abstract principles.
And, for design educators and students exploring the connection between fundamental human interactions and digital experiences, presenting a structured approach to teaching ethics through concrete examples.
For organisations striving to create trustworthy digital experiences that build authentic relationships with users rather than exploiting psychological vulnerabilities.
Whether you’re designing interfaces, services, or systems, this framework helps you recognise where caring design can slip into manipulation, allowing you to create experiences that genuinely respect human dignity and autonomy.
Traces in design literature and practice
Interestingly, while not explicitly framed as “gestures,” many of these same principles appear throughout influential design literature and frameworks. The language may differ, but the underlying human needs being addressed remain remarkably consistent:
- Don Norman’s emotional design principles address aspects of affirming and encouraging through his concepts of visceral, behavioral, and reflective design. His emphasis on feedback loops connects directly to the gesture of listening, while his discussion of constraints relates to protecting.
- Kat Holmes’ work on inclusive design embodies the gestures of welcoming and affirming through principles that recognize diverse abilities and experiences. Her emphasis on recognizing exclusion parallels the affirming gesture’s focus on validating existence.
- Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology have articulated principles that align with waiting (respecting users’ time) and protecting (safeguarding attention). Their critique of persuasive design often highlights the manipulative implementations of what could be caring gestures.
- Value-sensitive design methodology (Friedman and Hendry) incorporates elements of listening and accompanying by identifying stakeholder values and ensuring technology supports rather than undermines them.
- Service design frameworks often incorporate principles like co-creation and journey mapping that reflect the gestures of accompanying and welcoming users through experiences.
More directly related to care gestures in design, there are emerging explorations:
- The “Gestures of Care” project by Lab4Living explores non-verbal dimensions in care interactions, highlighting how actions and gestures constitute a significant portion of communication in caregiving environments. This research examines how designed artifacts can embody and facilitate these care gestures.
- “An Illustrated A to Z for the Design of Care”* discusses how design can abstract and embody gestures of care, addressing challenges in care systems. This work recognises that design practices can either support or hinder the expression of care gestures in various contexts.
These examples illustrate the broader application of caregiving gestures in design, underscoring the value of intentionality and embodied communication in both caregiving and design environments.
Sources for human gestures in design framework
Original caregiving gestures framework
Heine, R. (2015). Anthroposophic Nursing Practice: Foundations and Indications for Everyday Caregiving. SteinerBooks.
Heine, R. (2017). “The Twelve Nursing Gestures and the Cultural Mission of Nursing.” Journal of Anthroposophic Medicine, 34(2), 14-21.
Design literature connections
Don Norman’s emotional design
Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Basic Books.
Norman, D. A. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition. Basic Books.
Kat Holmes’ inclusive design
Holmes, K. (2018). Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design. MIT Press.
Holmes, K. (2020). “Inclusive Design: Designing for Human Diversity.” In The Routledge Companion to Design Research, 298-311.
Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology
Harris, T. (2016). “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds.” Retrieved from https://www.tristanharris.com/essays
Center for Humane Technology. (2019). The Humane Design Guide. https://humanetech.com/designguide
Value-sensitive design
Friedman, B., & Hendry, D. G. (2019). Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination. MIT Press.
Friedman, B., Kahn, P. H., & Borning, A. (2008). “Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems.” In The Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics, 69-101.
Service design frameworks
Stickdorn, M., Hormess, M. E., Lawrence, A., & Schneider, J. (2018). This is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World. O’Reilly Media.
Polaine, A., Løvlie, L., & Reason, B. (2013). Service Design: From Insight to Implementation. Rosenfeld Media.
Care gestures in design
Lab4Living. (2019). “Gestures of Care: Understanding Nonverbal Communication in Care Contexts.” Sheffield Hallam University. https://lab4living.org.uk/projects/gestures-of-care/
Kerspern, B., & Henchoz, N. (2019). “An Illustrated A to Z for the Design of Care.” Design Issues, 35(1), 67-83.
Applied ethics in design
Monteiro, M. (2019). Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It. Mule Design.
Nodder, C. (2013). Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us into Temptation. Wiley.
Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., & Toombs, A. L. (2018). “The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design.” In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-14.
Anthroposophic and Waldorf/Steiner approaches
Steiner, R. (1996). Education as a Social Problem: Six Lectures. Anthroposophic Press.
Uhrmacher, P. B. (1995). “Uncommon Schooling: A Historical Look at Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy, and Waldorf Education.” Curriculum Inquiry, 25(4), 381-406.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Christiaan Triebert.
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