Ayano Iwasaki
Family members who support a person living with schizophrenia or related forms of serious mental distress often perform continuous micro-adjustments in everyday interaction. These may include softening a response, delaying correction, redirecting a topic, remaining with silence, partially acknowledging an altered reality, or stepping back to preserve safety and dignity. Although such actions are often essential to sustaining daily life and relational continuity, they rarely become recognisable within formal support systems. They remain dispersed across fleeting moments and are therefore difficult to describe, compare, or communicate beyond the family.
This exhibit proposes legibility infrastructures as a systemic design approach to make invisible relational labour more recognisable and discussable, without reducing it to prescriptive caregiving guidance. The project builds on a pilot self-documented case log of remote family interaction and reframes moments of instability as interactional events. These events are described through four linked elements: Trigger, Family Move, Outcome, and Residue. Rather than documenting whole conversations, the framework isolates specific moments in which a family member must regulate, repair, or reconfigure an interaction, while also tracing what remains afterwards, such as vigilance, fatigue, guilt, tension, or withdrawal.
The exhibit presents this material through three related forms. L1 consists of event-based cards that render individual moments legible through selective textual and visual fragments. L2 presents an accumulation map that visualises how repeated responses form longer patterns of invisible care work over time. L3 takes the form of a sensory artefact that explores how cumulative residue might be perceived through light, vibration, or other non-textual media. Together, these representations function as boundary objects through which family members, supporters, and institutional actors may encounter the same relational material at different levels of abstraction.
This project does not claim to represent caregiver experience in general. Instead, it uses a situated case to test how intimate and difficult-to-name interactional work may be translated into forms that support shared recognition. In doing so, it contributes to systemic design discourse on mapping, translation, and the design of mediating infrastructures through which overlooked care work becomes discussable across personal and institutional scales.
Keywords: systemic design, invisible care, relational labour, legibility infrastructures, boundary objects, mental health caregiving, mapping, design research
