Corners and Intersections: Play + Relationship

And just sort of listening to your responses, kind of struck by, uh, notions of maybe, like, if you said sort of best practices or in thinking about, like, protocols and what it means to work with certain kinds of communities.

What types of, um, protocols or existing best practices, um, or just kind of like community expectations, um, did you run into, um, in this work, this research work that you were doing? And how did that kind of drive or shape the, the research that you were doing?

For me-

Mm-hmm

... uh, it really revealed to me, like, first of all, what I love about design, which is I think taking existing systems or services, typically in my case, um, and trying to reimagine them in a way that maybe is outside of anything that has been imagined before.

Um, and it's really exciting to do that, but then also balancing that with working with maybe vulnerable populations, people who- Um, there might be, like, extra ethical concerns about involving them in, especially design research.

I mean, I guess maybe specifically for you, like, um, your sort of note here mentions, like, working in long-term care homes and just kind of understanding a lot of, like, um, dynamics and sort of ethical consideration go into that space.

So I can imagine that's, well, maybe a lot of your work was... had to be kind of pre-shaped in a way to, that you [laughs] like-

Yeah

... were to access that.

Yeah.

And, um, yeah, curious of, like, what it was like to go through that process, or if it felt constraining or if, as you suggested, maybe it sometimes feels like a nice constraints to have to do the work that you wanna do.

Yeah.

Well, I think that we all know that there are certain limitations to the Canadian healthcare system and long-term care, especially since the pandemic has been really going through a lot of, of change.

Um, so yeah, I think that there are certain, like, constraints where it's important that we're, like, critical and question is it actually for the best of these, for these people who are, like, vulnerable or, um, is it something that we can start reimagining? Uh, yes, does that make sense in regards to your question?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Like, yeah.

I guess, where did it feel like you landed with your thesis at this point?

Well, I'm extending other semester [laughing] due, due to, uh-

Right

... ethical, uh, or not ethical, but institutional, like, bureau- bureaucratic, um, kind of constraints.

Uh, yeah, so I really had to grapple with [laughs] the, um, amount of, like, work and care that needs to be put in in order to, um, reimagine these systems that involve vulnerable populations.

Um, and I think rightfully so.

Like, it's, we shouldn't just, uh, be able to go in and, like, make whatever changes we want, especially, uh, as designers who may not, who are not experts in healthcare.