The Design of Care

This book has been written by the participants of the “Does Design Care…[3]?” workshop convened by the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University in September 2023. As the title of the workshop indicates it was the third workshop we, the editors of this book, have staged. We initiated the Does Design Care…? workshops as an international series of design thinking, making, and acting that provide a positive space to explore different ways to conceptualise, provoke, contest and disrupt care, plus serve as a venue for synthesising future visions of care. And we don’t place any limits on interpretations, boundaries, and sectors of care when and where we use the word ‘Care’.

Each Does Design Care…? workshop is highly interactive with participants producing a range of outputs including journal and book publications, working papers, and other creative outputs. Does Design Care…[1]? took place in Imagination Lancaster, in 2017, and led to multi-authored research outputs including ; “Does Design Care…? An international workshop of Design Thought and Action.” and “The Lancaster Care Charter”, which was published in Design Issues (Vol. 35, No. 1, 2019). Does Design Care…[2]? took place in Chiba University, Japan, in 2019, which led to several multi authored outputs, which stimulated further debate around care. These included; “An Illustrated A to Z for the Design of Care Book” / “The Chiba Care Protocol” and “Does Design Care…? Head-to-Head debates.”

At the workshop in Belfast we set the participants two main tasks. One resulted in a book illustrating their concepts about a “100 years of care journey” (Figure 1) and the other is this book with its 24 chapters in response to a series of prompts under the title of the Department of Care; prompts that we will come to soon.