Design Principles for Trauma-Informed Information Systems for Refugees

Abstract

Information systems (IS) increasingly mediate refugee reception and integration, shaping access to legal status, healthcare, education, and employment. While IS research has examined digital divides, e-government, and sociotechnical inclusion, trauma remains largely absent from design-oriented theorizing, despite extensive evidence that forced displacement profoundly affects cognition, emotion, and trust. This study adopts a trauma-informed design perspective to investigate how integration-related IS are experienced by refugees. Following an echelons design science research (eDSR) approach, we ground prescriptive design knowledge in lived experience. Empirical data were collected through 35 interviews with Ukrainian adults residing in 22 Finnish cities and analyzed using qualitative content analysis informed by digital divide theory and trauma-informed design. The findings show that language barriers, fragmented information ecosystems, opaque system logic, repeated data requests, and rigid interaction flows transform routine administrative encounters into emotionally charged and high-risk experiences. Trauma-related vulnerability amplifies cognitive overload, fear of error, and avoidance, while informal human mediation emerges as a critical compensatory mechanism. Based on these insights, we derive seven empirically grounded design principles for trauma-informed IS, emphasizing emotional and cognitive safety, transparency and predictability, graduated engagement, integrated human mediation, linguistic and institutional legibility, data dignity and user agency, and ecosystem coherence. The study contributes intermediate design knowledge by articulating empirically grounded trauma-informed actionable design principles for IS.