Designing care-centered futures through participatory co-creation
What does it mean to design with care — not just for it? This workshop and exhibition created space for a multicultural, multi-gender group to collectively imagine equitable care systems, making the invisible visible through participatory process and shared making.
The Challenge
Care holds communities together - yet it is chronically undervalued, unevenly distributed, and almost never centered in design practice. Parsons CareLab's Visibilizing Care Festival set out to change that. The challenge wasn't just conceptual - it was practical. How do you hold space for a diverse, multicultural, multi-gender group to explore something as personal and political as care, without flattening difference, rushing toward solutions, or letting the process itself reproduce the inequities it's trying to address?
My Role & Contribution
As Workshop Facilitator, I designed and led the full arc of the co-design session — from structure and exercises to facilitation, synthesis, and exhibition. My contribution encompassed:
Workshop Design
Designing the session structure, exercises, and facilitation guides grounded in participatory, care-centered, and pluriversal design principles.
Facilitation
How might participatory design shape technologies that reflect community knowledge and public values?
Exhibition
Bringing the workshop's output into a shared public form - making participant visions visible, tangible, and in conversation with each other.
The Approach: A Holistic Care Toolkit
I structured the session around three interwoven frameworks — not as theory to be taught, but as lenses to look through together:
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Participatory Design - participants as co-designers, not subjects. Their lived experience was the expertise in the room.
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Care-Centered Design - centering the labor, relationships, and systems of care that design so often renders invisible. Asking: whose care counts? Who carries it? What would it look like to share it differently
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Pluriversal Design - making room for multiple worldviews, knowledges, and ways of imagining futures. Not one answer, but many coexisting ones.
The session was deliberately designed to open up questions rather than close them — surfacing tensions, stories, and possibilities that no single perspective could hold alone.
How Might
we design in the space between worldviews?
The most generative moments came not from consensus but from sitting with disagreement. Productive tension — not resolution — became the method.
we treat care as a design material, not just a theme?
When care moves from background to material, it changes what questions get asked, who gets to ask them, and what counts as a good outcome.
we design the conditions for others to think together?
Facilitation is design. The room, the pace, the prompts, the silences - all of it shapes what becomes possible. The process is never neutral.
