Abstract
Emerging from a three-year arts-based participatory design and research collaboration, the Who Cares? Approach is a framework for social change developed to understand how a community in rural British Columbia could cultivate a system of support for aging. Through iterative cycles of team retreats, including creative engagement and group interviews, project members developed a framework grounded in values of trust, presence, creativity, storytelling, relationality, and acknowledgement of the unknown. By transforming value statements into diagrams, installations, and participatory events, the project demonstrated how design artifacts can act as mediators of shared meaning and catalysts for ethical reflection. The resulting visual framework captures the project's values as nonlinear, non-hierarchical, and overlapping. The paper presents a model of participatory design that treats values as living, negotiable, and materially enacted, and illustrates how creative research methods can generate new insights into care within complex social systems.
Keywords
Participatory Design, Aging Care, Emergent Design, Community-Based Participatory Research
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1546
Citation
Wilkinson, L., Reid, C., Raber, C., and Hannan, J. (2026) The Who Cares? Approach: Materializing Values in Community-Based Participatory Research, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1546
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
The Who Cares? Approach: Materializing Values in Community-Based Participatory Research
Emerging from a three-year arts-based participatory design and research collaboration, the Who Cares? Approach is a framework for social change developed to understand how a community in rural British Columbia could cultivate a system of support for aging. Through iterative cycles of team retreats, including creative engagement and group interviews, project members developed a framework grounded in values of trust, presence, creativity, storytelling, relationality, and acknowledgement of the unknown. By transforming value statements into diagrams, installations, and participatory events, the project demonstrated how design artifacts can act as mediators of shared meaning and catalysts for ethical reflection. The resulting visual framework captures the project's values as nonlinear, non-hierarchical, and overlapping. The paper presents a model of participatory design that treats values as living, negotiable, and materially enacted, and illustrates how creative research methods can generate new insights into care within complex social systems.