Abstract
Design in health and care has rapidly expanded into service experiences, digital, and all things patient-centered. As healthcare designers, with curiosities and concerns about our “collaborative survival,” we open up our conversations, unravelling long careers in service, health, and design and evolving questions of care for designers, educators, and citizens. The book The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing offers respite and reframe. Tsing’s book is a critical examination of the harms of capitalism, sharing learnings about matsutake mushroom ecosystems and relational concepts required for a liveable future. It sparked our interest in alternative narratives – complex, collective, diverse, intangible. This paper explores the fictions and frictions of healthcare and our conversations about design that cares — through the metaphor of precious mushrooms that thrive in the ruins of a forest. What is care that lives on the fringes of predictability, scale, efficiencies, and profit?
Keywords
Healthcare, Fictions of care, Assemblage, Matsusake, Entanglement, Precarity, Care abundance, Resistance
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2023.100
Citation
Lago Arenas, M.,and Osaki, M.(2023) Citizen-designers making worlds in healthcare: A reflective reading of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The mushroom at the end of the world, in Holmlid, S., Rodrigues, V., Westin, C., Krogh, P. G., Mäkelä, M., Svanaes, D., Wikberg-Nilsson, Å (eds.), Nordes 2023: This Space Intentionally Left Blank, 12-14 June, Linköping University, Norrköping, Sweden. https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2023.100
Conference Track
exploratorypapers
Citizen-designers making worlds in healthcare: A reflective reading of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The mushroom at the end of the world
Design in health and care has rapidly expanded into service experiences, digital, and all things patient-centered. As healthcare designers, with curiosities and concerns about our “collaborative survival,” we open up our conversations, unravelling long careers in service, health, and design and evolving questions of care for designers, educators, and citizens. The book The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing offers respite and reframe. Tsing’s book is a critical examination of the harms of capitalism, sharing learnings about matsutake mushroom ecosystems and relational concepts required for a liveable future. It sparked our interest in alternative narratives – complex, collective, diverse, intangible. This paper explores the fictions and frictions of healthcare and our conversations about design that cares — through the metaphor of precious mushrooms that thrive in the ruins of a forest. What is care that lives on the fringes of predictability, scale, efficiencies, and profit?