Healing through making

Summary: My research project is a personal journey of discovery that aims to explore how communication and design can open the doors for healing and learning far beyond conventional ways. Through this intentional, often circular thinking and specific exploratory projects that make up the research, I have attempted to understand how material practice can help mitigate the effects of grief to assist in the ideas of self-care and healing. It has provided a holistic view of healing and care that recenters culture and identity integral to self-care and well-being. Lauren Vaughan states caring for unknown others is so challenging because the farther we move from the familiar, the less control we have and the more risk of failure is. Often, we find ourselves becoming lost, unknown of what it may feel like to be in touch with ourselves while we care for others in the community. There’s an under-appreciation for understanding ourselves and that reflective element that I believe is critical to being a designer who can help, listen or even create or formulate work with stakeholders in all fields. The research uses an experiential (phenomenological) approach which allows contemplation on the experience of practice to create a conceptual work for mitigating grief through material practice. The material practice finds meaning and value in the cultural capital. I use auto-ethnography because it requires the researcher or designer first to question themselves and their place in the world. Schouwengerg and Kaethler, authors of the auto-ethnographic turn in design, contrast with historical processes in ethnography and design that look outward first. This approach, however, closely tethers research with creative personal expression. They state, “forging deeply intimate objects that research and communicate personal sentiments, traumas, fears, obsessions, hopes, fascinations, passions, and more.” As we recuperate from the pandemic, it is essential to share and have conversations about how to continue engaging with the self and others. I write this thesis to serve as both a guide and an invitation for my fellow design researchers - an invitation to dedicate ourselves to facing the realities of life with care, explore how best to heal and commit to ourselves as a community by using creative healing centred design techniques to move forward.