Eva Monestier and Tatiana Efremenko
What does it mean to care—and can care be learned? This workshop invites designers and researchers to develop their capacity to notice, map, and restore care relations across human and non-human systems. This session is grounded in a Carelational Framework developed by the authors, which treats care as simultaneously a cultural phenomenon, an affective experience, a deliberate choice, and a concrete action. The workshop follows the Careography method, developed within the framework to apply it in practice. It is a systemic mapping method for tracing how care flows, breaks down, and might be regenerated within complex socioecological systems.
The workshop opens with a warm-up reflection on what care means across different cultural backgrounds, professions, and personal histories—surfacing the plurality of starting points in the room. Participants then move into small groups, each working with a real case of “failed design”: a well-intentioned intervention in urban space, a food system, an environmental context, or product design that missed or disrupted the care relations it sought to support. Groups use careography mapping to trace care relations within their case, identify where care is absent or broken, and propose how those relations might be regenerated or reimagined.
A central provocation runs through the session: care is not neutral. It involves attention, power, and the active decision of what—and who—to make visible. Non-human actors (species, ecosystems, infrastructures) are care agents too, though they are rarely named as such in design practice. By following care relations in multiple directions, participants develop new vocabulary and perceptual skills for working with complex, interdependent systems. The session closes with a collective exercise to distil shared principles of care from across the maps, contributing to a living publication consolidating Careography as a method that the authors develop from the workshop outputs. Participants leave with expanded noticing skills, a relational mapping method, and a set of co-authored care principles to carry into their own practice.
Keywords: care, multispecies design, relational mapping, systemic design, more-than-human, design practice, careography