Design for Dignity: A Guide for Architects & Designers to Address Modern Slavery
Architects and designers influence global supply chains in powerful ways. Every material choice — from textiles and joinery to furniture, metals, and flooring — carries the potential to contribute to positive, systemic change and support safer, fairer supply chains.
This guide was created to support designers and architects who want to lead with integrity.
It brings the realities of modern slavery into clear view and gives you the practical tools, questions, and frameworks needed to design responsibly and with purpose.
Grounded in the 5 Principles of Meaningful Action, the guide supports your everyday practice by helping you engage suppliers with confidence, understand material and product risks, and design spaces that honour dignity rather than conceal exploitation.
Your influence is immense.
Your decisions ripple across industries.
Your leadership matters.
This guide helps you turn intention into impact — and design a future where every material choice strengthens transparency, responsibility, and social equity across our supply chains.
Driving Social Impact in Your Supply Chain: A Starter Guide for Product Suppliers
Modern slavery and labour exploitation are not distant issues — they are risks embedded in global supply chains that shape the products we make, sell, and distribute every day. From textiles and timber to metals, stone, and furniture, the products moving through Australia’s built environment can carry unseen human cost.
This guide is your call to lead.
Driving Social Impact in Your Supply Chain is a powerful, practical resource designed for product manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers who want to move beyond compliance and take meaningful, values-led action. It will help you understand where exploitation occurs, how your business may be connected to risk, and what you can do — right now — to build fair, transparent, responsible supply chains.
You’ll learn how to map risk, engage your suppliers with confidence, ask better questions, and take action grounded in the 5 Principles of Meaningful Action: Connection, Curiosity, Commitment, Courage, and Collaboration.
Because every product you make, stock, or sell is a chance to protect someone’s freedom.
Because your clients, the industry, and your stakeholders are demanding leadership.
Because genuine impact starts with the suppliers who are closest to the materials, the manufacturing, and the people.
This guide is your first step toward driving social impact — one product, one decision, one conversation at a time.