Marit Askbo, Omri Geiger, and Thomas Gundersen
The lived experience/journey of cancer survivors
This workshop invites participants to take an active part in our research on the lived experience/journey of cancer survivors: the abrupt transition between intensive hospital treatment, returning to a life where everything has changed, and the difficulty of reintegrating into life’s systems: work, family, routine health check-ups, and so on.
So far, this appears to be a global phenomenon—one that is consistently pushed to the margins of discourse.
In this workshop we first wish to discuss the phenomenon more broadly: the transition between systems, and the gap between them. What forms can this gap take? Is it always helpful to create an organic transition from one system to another? Might the gap be celebrated with rituals or widened somehow? In what ways could this gap be worked with to allow for smoother transitions for people who have had a life-changing experience and now must reconnect all the pieces again?
We observe that systems that hold individuals within a structured and protective framework do not simply provide a set of services or containment. They create a form of belonging, dependence and security. We define the system that holds the patient during treatment as an environment—an environment representing safety, access to resources and knowledge, continuity and order, a crucible (Nelson, 2025). When an individual exits this crucible through recovery, they may feel like they have lost the structural conditions and the protection that the system, or crucible, represented.
We wish to generate a broad discussion and shared thinking around similar experiences, such as released prisoners, drug rehabilitation, birth, and cancer treatment, and to unpack the complexity of returning to life after a life-changing experience—where the return to the system’s embrace is no longer an option, or at least not a desired option in most cases. In other words, how might we create a more nuanced and successful acclimatisation and reintegration into life?
In this workshop we will make gigamaps through group work. We will invite participants to contribute from their own knowledge and experience and collectively attempt to absorb the knowledge and discussion on the broader topic and on a specific case study, while holding a recurring dialogue from multiple perspectives that may shed new light on our research subject and open new directions in our attempt to find solutions to this phenomenon.
Keywords: systems oriented design (SOD), gigamapping, design tools, post-treatment transition, re-entry, systems thinking, systemic gap, designing the transition, forced relations
