Towards a relational approach to design
Part of being an immigrant is losing the community and the social ties you had and starting new ones at the new country. This wasn’t an easy process for me and arriving at a new city, new neighbourhood, proved challenging as I lost my sense of belonging and my support network. This finally changed after I got a dog and started to engage with other local dog owners. They slowly became my friends and part of a local support network, people that I saw almost every day during dog walks and who, like me, were also excited to connect with their fellow neighbours.
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This experience made me reflect on the importance of community to people’s well-being. While this was evident through the informal conversations I was having with people from my neighbourhood, I was inspired by a wide range of academic and expert literature that were placing human relationships in the forefront of service and policy design.
As an MA Service Design student, I decided to explore this theme within De Beauvoir, the neighbourhood where I’ve been living in for the past 8 years. The video that follows is my initial attempt to start recognising the many structures that makes up this community: https://vimeo.com/835064406?share=copy
