Objects of & for Care | 2023
Research informs Making

Role
Concept Development & Ideation, Creative Direction, Ethnographer, Storyteller, Photographer

Awards
Parsons BFA Product Design Social Justice Award

a care based design practice is rooted in relationships and the specificities of the people a designer may design for. This project is a 15-week long investigation into the role care can play in shaping design practice and design thinking.

THE OBJECTS

A gift for my mother

I want to gift my mom an endless bloom. I want to gift her a lifetime of sweet necter and bird song. At forty-five Ma began to reinvent herself, learning to love and laugh and dance all over again. At forty-five she left the home where she had spent twenty-five years growing the garden of her dreams. In its void I gift her a place to celebrate her new blooms, to reinvent her garden and to put all her joys on display. I build her a pedestal, as if to say, Ma everything you do is magic, all that you are becoming is devine, you are the garden and the birdsong, you always have been.

A gift for my grandmom

To my nani I want to gift an endless love. A grand daughter-grandmother relationship is too short to hold all the sweetness of our relationship. So in its vain, I made us an heirloom, a silver bowl that can be passed down from generation to generation to contain the sweet safron rice, meetha chawal, my great grandmother used to make us. The vessel and its contents transcend time, and in them I say:

I love you forever
beyond time
beyond lives.

A gift for my sister

In the monsoons of our childhood my sister would build us paper boats to float in our flooded garden, turning puddles into an endless ocean of possibility. In the summer of our adult lives, there are no more flooded backyards to play in, and often we forget to dance in the rain. Living across continents from eachother, far away from our garden of wonder, I gift her a piece of our girlhood. I make space for us to fold paper boats again, to remind us that even on the rainist days of life we can create a little magic with our hands.

Pedestals

Vessels

Ritual

THE MANIFESTO

The 10 principles of Care in Design propose a new set values to guide our ideas of good design. What might objects look like if care is the guiding principle?

THE RESEARCH

How it started

This project began from a deep yearning to find a method of designing that reached beyond the constraints of tranditional industrial design.

Reframing the Design Process

EXPERIMENTS

Experiment 1
Conversations with a Cup

Objects are active participants in our networks of care, shaping how we relate to ourselves, our bodies, eachother and the environments we live in.

Affordances of a Cup: Learning to hold

Containment of objects: Relational Analysis

Experiment 2
Form Studies

A Cup is a tool for care. How does pulling and pushing at its shape change your relationship to the object?

A study on Intentionaly: Cup with a Large Rim

What Can A Cup Be?

Experiment 3
Object/Care Relationships

Participants were asked to draw an object they care for as well as an object that cares for them.

Experiment 4
Learning from loving an egg carton

Can I commune with a thrown away stack of egg cartons by understanding their material intelligence and saving them from an untimely death?

CONVERSATIONS

Speaking to my Community

Care is a community based practice, rooted in our relationships to eachother. Each person in our social circle is an expert, caring and being cared for by the people in their lives. I reached out to friends, and family members to gain a deeper understanding of how they care.

DESIGNING THE OBJECTS

Turning Research into Tangible Objects

Gift Giving

The relationship between designer and user is often transactional, we are tied together by a thread of monetary exchange. Gift giving, in contrast, does not ask for anything in return.

A gift for my Nani

A gift for my Mom

WORKING WITH MAKERS

Working with Material Experts

As I approached this project through the lens of care, it was important for me to work with people who had intimate relationships with the different materials I was interested in. Here care in design is a collaborative process, where I could tap into preestablished relationships.

Wooden Pedestals

Working with Eric Moshiem to create wooden pestals with castel joints that can be easily taken apart and packed in a suitcase.

Gathering Materials from friends

Hand Hammered Silver Bowl

I worked alongside Columbian jewelry maker Adriana Aurea Joyas to forge a silver vessel for my grand mother.

Ceramic Vessels

Gary Bui hand built space for a floating garden

Robyn crafted a memory of the monsoon lakes

CARE AS PRAXIS IN DESIGN

The core purpose of this project was to rethink the values that guide my creative practice. In establishing new ways of approaching design, the objects we design turn out to be fundamentally different from the ones created through the framework of industrial design.

A care based design practice allows us to center a whole host of stakeholders whose needs, desires and input are often ignored in an industry centered design ideology.

Objects of & for care

Objects of & for care demostrate how this design methodology can be embodied and embedded into trangible designs.

Research Under the Guidance of:
Ari Elefterin, Award winning Designer & Reseacher

Material Collaborators:
Robyn Young, Ceramicist
Garry Bui, Ceramicist
Adreana Aurea Joyas, Silversmith
Eric Moshiem, Woodworker

Work Cited
¹Hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. United States: Harper Collins, 2018.

²Kleinman, Arthur. The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor. United States: Penguin Publishing Group, 2019.

³Dieter Rams: Ten Principles for Good Design. Germany: Prestel Publishing, 2021.

⁴Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms. Germany: Transcript, 2010.

VEDIKA MODI