Caring Spaces

Through this research, I was able to discover how there is a lack of support systems for designers who are struggling to navigate through the changing landscape of design. It points to a gap that there are no current tools or resources to facilitate these conversations around tensions. The Caring Spaces research responds to this challenge by using the theme of ‘care’, to unpack and define its role in how it could help create collaborative and supportive interventions to make space for designers to come together to hold important conversations about fears, tensions and discomforts. Through a series of experimental workshops and activities, this research questions how we might co-create cultures of care for design practice. It led the design solution to respond to the unprecedented time of the pandemic to creating a ‘caring space’ — a platform where designers, creatives or teams can come together (while working remotely) and still be able to collaborate, facilitate and experience care workshops virtually.

1.2 — Literature Review

Early in the year, my literature review explored three themes: design in higher education, social practice / social responsibility and designer identity. These themes were identified to research the challenges that may impact a designer’s journey within practice.

The emphasis on researching a ‘designer's journey' came from my curiosity about asking the question: what kind of structures or systems exists that can support designers who may be shifting within design practice? From this inquiry, I thought it made sense to explore the experiences that designers may encounter from university education through to practice.

Throughout the year as the research progressed, the themes are written as part of my literature review: social practice, social responsibility and designer identity became no longer relevant towards the research project. The project shifted significantly towards themes of collaborative and reflective practices which although have not been documented in the literature review, the theoretical connections to these themes have been included as part of this exegesis. One theme however was still relevant and that was ‘design education’. The literature synthesised in this area points towards a gap of how teaching in design education settings needed to go beyond the design brief, by allowing additional time to work on ‘non-cognitive skills'. The Grocott et.al (2019) research paper offers an insight into how their Transforming Mindset studio reshapes pedagogy by focusing on developing the student's intrapersonal skills such as the ‘self, interior and experiential learning’ on the belief that “as design practice continues to change, there is a need for generation of designers to deeply understand the human experience” (Grocott et al., 2019). These human experiences reflect the complexities and challenges that come with design practice and can be experienced as early in the first year of a student’s degree.

This was a study that had positioned my research to acknowledge how important non-cognitive skills are as they play a key role in influencing behaviour. These skills are the key drivers that help us make decisions, assess our own feelings and can develop our abilities to help reframe our thinking and behaviours in order to adapt to changing situations. As my research is concerned with identifying what kind of support systems exist to help designers who are shifting — Grocott’s study has opened up the door for the project to question, what kind of skills are needed that can be developed to encourage collaborative behaviours and practices that can allow support systems to be designed?

1.3 — Research Method

Love or Breakup Letter

As part of my investigation to explore these ‘non-cognitive’ skills, I started off the research by getting a group of designers to write a ‘love or a breakup’ letter to their relationship with design. While I was interested in getting to know what each of their journeys was like, I was also curious about if there were many designers who may be experiencing a shift from their communication design practice towards another realm within design. This shift was something that I was experiencing within myself as a designer and realised how challenging it was to navigate within this space. I used this experience as the motivation to direct my further explorations in an attempt to open up the space and expand the research beyond just the ‘self’.

The Task
The task was to get participants to spend no longer than 10–15 minutes to write a love letter or breakup letter to design. Letters must be handwritten and not typed out.

Love Letters

Results

Before analysing the results, I had the assumption that those who wrote a love letter would display positive emotions and statements through their writing. While breakup letters would do the opposite. After looking at the results, I was glad to be proven wrong. Those who wrote a love letter, had actually written a ‘love’ letter that was tied with experiences of ‘hate’. I call these love/hate letters. Those who wrote a breakup letter, one letter embodied a more negative tone while the other, was sentimental — it was as if they were writing a ‘goodbye’, parting ways with an experience that once brought them joy.

1.4 — Research Question

From the results of making sense of the data from the love or breakup letters, I questioned the idea of ‘love’ and its counterpart ‘care’. Could care have a place in a person’s relationship to design to ease or neutralise the tensions of hate? From this inquiry, I have framed the following research around the question:

How might we co-create a culture of care for design practice?

And to unpack some of the key terms:

Co-create: meaning how can we do this together where everyone plays a part.
Culture of care: Through learning, doing and experiencing practices of care, we are reshaping the environment where interventions of care can exist.
Design Practice: where the discipline of design exists like design education and professional practice.