Thank you for coming to our virtual presentation of "Making Design Memoirs:
Understanding and Honoring Difficult Experiences." I'm Laura Devendorf. I'm
Kristina Andersen. And I'm Aisling Kelliher. So this is a research project
that's rooted in our experience of becoming mothers which we want to
unpack a little bit to say that it was really rooted in this discomfort or this
dissonance that emerged between how we thought things should be and how things
really were. This became for us a matter of really interrogating this idea of
"shoulding." Whether we hear it from popular press or from consumer products
or you from ourselves, our own internalized sense of who I should be as
opposed to who I am and how those two images in many ways don't necessarily
align with each other very well and cause us a lot of emotional turmoil in
many ways. So we began to tunnel down through this little bit more. Again, the
notion of becoming a mother, if you look at images in movies or television shows
there is this idea that the mother is happy; that we're delighted to be caring for
another individual; we're remarkably attached to them; and that we're able to
have children in the first place; as opposed to actually feeling like, well,
sometimes I want to run away from these things I've made and I want space just
for myself. Or even I'd rather go back to the before time when they weren't
here. How do you reconcile these?...This should and this is, and not in a way
that's trying to resolve something but can I kind of sit within the space of
these kinds of conflicting emotions and work through them so we began to see
this as more like a liminal spectrum of like, yes, there's these hard emotions
here and these felt experiences. And perhaps theres a way I can't really speak of it but
maybe we can design our way into that space. So that means that we wanted to
start thinking about these experiences of something we could address
subjectively so that we could think not necessarily documenting
them or turning them into a specific
problem. Rather we wanted to really find a way to address how they felt. In
order to start this process we started making individual objects and
these objects were about feelings...so this idea of devising designs in an
effort to make about what you cannot speak about. So we call these things
Design Memoirs and we use the term memoirs to indicate this subjective
personal angle. We wanted to make sure that we didn't think of it as a way of
documenting a particular process. We wanted it to be very clear that some of
these feelings might be temporary: they might be just how it was today
and they might be subjective; and colored by other things; and we might
feel differently over time. In this we were leaning on the notions
of memoirs from literature and this idea of privileging the felt over the
factual. This, we felt, allowed us to start interrogating our
own biases and our own positions and also allowed us to speak back to design
narratives as a way to insist on these complex gray scales but also to
insist that sometimes we have to address the wholeness of these experiences
rather than some particular little individual aspect that, you know, we
should really fix. Our process in writing this paper was to look back at
this set of practices that we did and start to really formulate how we could
understand these as knowledge objects or of relevance to design research. And this
evolved by thinking about the overall process and how we gleaned meaning from
them which involved, of course, a process of making and then a process of sharing
and then a process of diffracting, which we'll talk about in more detail later
This project is one of the memoirs that I [Laura]
contributed called the nipple poncho or the exoskeleton for sucking. And we're
showing a few of the examples here but there are more in the paper if you have
time to look at that. But the exoskeleton for sucking was really representing this
tension I felt between how I feel like I should be feeling that I should be this,
you know, oasis of caregiving and how I really felt kind of deficient in my
ability to do that and at many points I felt like I was physically wasting away
because of the fluids I'm giving to other people. Both emotionally and
physically in the form of breast milk. So these concepts were really
inspired by reading more about the spacesuit and thinking of the spacesuit
as a kind of body architecture and the way that it at once keeps your
body safe from harsh environments but also represents what specifically about
those environments is harsh in its form. In that sense each of these
crocheted pacifier nipples was supposed to be to protect me from this
environment where my children need me, where I'm expected to be a caregiving
teacher among the University and to really satiate everyone while showing
the ridiculousness of that kind of a feeling or demand.
I [Kristina] made a series of
pockets for this project and I'm gonna show a couple of them here. This
particular pocket is the madness pocket it is the the madness inherent in
repeating a task and expecting different outcomes. It's the attempt of making a
rectilinear pattern reconcile itself along curved edge and it's done in a
pocket that is already sewn into a dress. It tries to capture that feeling of finding
that certain things are impossible but must be done nevertheless so must be
attempted. We wake up every morning and we do it again and it doesn't ever, maybe,
work out but there is a repetitive desire to having a go
and this this futile attempt of reconciling these patterns along this
curve which of course don't work but also don't not work in a sense.
this is a pocket I made from my mother. She was suffering from heart problems
and this is a pocket for a heart monitor it was made as a sort of magic talisman.
I guess I was trying to implore her to stay which turned out to be a weak magic.
All of the pockets that I made we're really addressing the notion of being
both a daughter and a mother too and finding a certain sort of inspiration in
that triangular relationship. This is a pocket I made for my daughter who's
older than the daughters of my co-authors and for us in this moment
it's all about independence and about handing over power and about allowing a
young person to take freedom. And this pocket is barely a pocket it's
some money sewn into the color of a shirt. It is both hidden and not hidden
and it's a symbolic transfer of power in the form of money.
And so that theme of hidden and unhidden is kind of prevalent in the design memoir
that I [Aisling] put together. So in this case I've created a medal and it's a medal that
makes visible a process that for several years, almost two years of my life, was
completely hidden but extremely complicated. It involved lots and lots
of medicine—I was doing secondary fertility treatments—a lot of travel a
lot of injecting a lot of keeping spreadsheets and it's not a pleasant
experience. But several years after the fact I kind of have reconciled with
it and feel like I would like to commemorate this much as one receives a
medal for having gone through something, like I endured this, and I want
some form of recognition for it. So I created this fairly simple medal that is
multi-jet printed, so it has elements inside and
also elements on the outside embossed and commanding attention. In this case
it has my what was originally a very annoying medical diagnosis that
constantly reminded me that I was very old but also I'm like...I'm using that as
a badge of honor now. I'm like, yes, I did this and fortunately it worked and I did
manage to have a second child. And then I just also want you to
recognize the question of what am I supposed to do with this? Do I wear it out? Sometimes I do,
sometimes I carry it with me in my pocket for complicated experiences
because it has a beautiful tacky tactile component to the embossed letters. But
mostly it sits beside my back alongside images of the most precious things to me
and so I keep it there and I just like it to be near me.
so one of the things that happened when we remade these things was that it made us understand
each other better and it made us feel, not like it had happened to us, but it
made us have a better understanding of how it may have felt.
But we still wanted to engage more deeply with each other's experiences and
and while we kept these these individual objects as individual objects it was difficult.
We found ourselves being too respectful of each other's experiences.
We couldn't speak to them because it hadn't happened to us. So we decided
to try and find a way of of grappling with them and we came up with this
notion of diffracting them—designing one object through another object. And as an
example, here is a beginning of the description of the pocket and the badge.
The badge is, in a broader sense, this notion of a recognition
of a hardship, of a bravery done, a bravery survived. And the pocket
is really about smuggling tools of power, smuggling coping mechanisms with
you in your everyday life. So one way of thinking about the combination of the
medal and the pocket, as was literally just described, this idea of thinking
about these objects of pride as coming along with us as being
there as reminders of strength as reminders of things we have done.
We did three diffractive readings of the different objects that you can read
in the paper, but one of the things that came out of this was that we started
feeling that we could start designing with each other's objects. We could start
fabulating things even if they weren't ours.
As we were writing this paper and reflecting we started to see the space
between all of our diffractions that we started labeling as resonances. They
had these qualities or these ways of vibrating off each other that were
interesting in the relationship to how design research is typically practiced.
On one we saw that these diffractions of the memoirs, in and of themselves,
really allowed for contradiction to take place and for multiple things that you
would think were mutually exclusive to hang together, such as the feeling of
wanting to be a warrior and expressing pride while also making a garment for
yourself that's necessarily about how vulnerable you are. And those two things
as being really what colors the experience instead of it having be
one or the other, and that they are existing really at the same time. In this they
also allowed for struggle. We didn't find any ways where we felt like
we had to make our histories better or find the silver lining or smile through
all the experiences. For mine [Laura's] in particular, I felt that did have quite a bit
of rage and frustration in the construction but also in sort of
shouting and wanting people to see how I felt. And marking that is really a
positive experience or something that is worthy of sharing and worthy of taking
note of and rendering in new ways.
As we concluded the paper we took a broader look over the project as a whole and asked
ourselves... what did we do!? And what we want end with is to suggest that design memoirs are for designers by designers and that
when we undertook this project it was very critical that we did it through the
lens of our practices as designers and as people who we felt very close with
and friendly with and became more friendly with but even through that we
had this contract where any of us could sort of leave the collaboration at any
time no questions asked because you don't want somebody to be required to
share things in this way it just wouldn't be ethical. What they also do is
they treated this idea of understanding each other for just walking alongside
each other in experiences that, yes, were different but were in many ways
something that we felt like we could see in each other and at least witness for
each other. The final thing we see is that these objects might not be a
contribution in design as...you know... someone at Twitter will start making
exoskeletons at some point or something like that, but that there are emotional
objects that might just stick in your brain. And that the next time you're
presented with a project about supporting mothers you might take an
extra moment to consider the wholeness and the rawness and the turbulence and
the struggle of that experience and honor it instead of trying to get rid of it right away.
thank you to our families to our collaborators to
everyone who helped us with this project and thank you all for for watching our talk