Co-creating Practices of care

This research explores and addresses the challenges and tensions that young designers may face throughout their educational and professional experience as they develop their relationship with design. It investigates if there is a lack of reliable methods or framework around the theme of ‘care’ that is needed to be produced in professional practices to help designers navigate through the changing landscape and challenges experienced in the design discipline. 

Collaborative methods were employed using co-design principles to conduct a series of workshops discovering the role and function of care. Using a ‘designing with’ mindset, participants were encouraged to question how they might rethink ways that could support designers who may be shifting or trying to re-orientate their journey with practice. The limitations of the pandemic meant the physicality and experimentations of workshops could not be completely conducted face-to-face. However, this led to the opportunities for design to inquire how might we practice care, collaborate and experience sense-making ways through the space of a virtual workshop. The outcomes of the research project will yield a working prototype — a Miro template that is ready to be used to host virtual care workshops. The work invites opportunities for it to be improved and updated with new resources once it has been interacted with over time. This permits a better understanding of how applicable and suitable the outcome may be. As the role of care grows, new methods and interventions will be needed to help the design become adaptable and tailored for diverse teams in design practice and beyond.

The significance of care underpinning this research produces a new kind of knowledge as designers not only have to learn how to work with the physical and technical materials of practice, they are also learning how to navigate their tensions, challenges and discomforts‚ the social material, material that is internal and invisible that may not be readily expressed in words. Care provides a framework to learn about latent knowledge and provides opportunities for further research to develop methods that can not only invite practitioners but students together, to help co-create cultures of change between the educational and professional context.